Micro Wind Turbine Control System
Luis Benítez-Montalván, Juan Rivera-Cruz and Diego Aponte-Roa
Wind energy can be considered a consolidated renewable source to produce electrical energy due to its advances in recent decades for practical applications. This explains why every day micro-wind turbines are becoming more popular and emerging as one of the most promising technologies in the field of energy systems. Due to the natural behavior of wind turbines, recent researches are focused on the design of a control system to optimize the power production and operate the turbine with safety. This work presents the implementation of a control system with a buck-boost DC-DC converter to either step-up or step-down the voltage supplied by a wind generator to a constant load. Control system include a microcontroller to manage all sensors to display accurate readings of voltage, current, and power consumption of the whole system. Results shows an efficiency from 91.5% to 96.5% for different expected input voltages supplying a constant load of 10W. Matlab/Simulink was used to model the complete system and a comparison between simulation and experimental results is presented as well.