Power Electronic Concepts

Power electronics have two strong features:

Controllable frequency:
 Make it possible actually to apply the variable-speed concept
 This feature results in the following direct benefits to wind turbines:
o Optimal energy operation;
o Reduced loads on the gear and drive train, as wind speed variations are absorbed
by rotor speed changes;
o Load control, as life-consuming loads can be avoided;
o A practical solution for gearless wind turbines, as the power converter acts as an
electrical gearbox; and
o Reduced noise emission at low wind speeds.
Disadvantages
 Power losses and
 The increased costs for the additional equipment.

Power plant characteristics:

Provide the possibility for wind farms to become active elements in the power system.
Regarding the grid, this property results in several advantages:
o the active or reactive power flow of a wind farm is controllable;
o the power converter in a wind farm can be used as a local reactive power source (e.g.
in the case of weak grids);
o the wind farm has a positive influence on network stability; and
o power converters improve the wind farm’s power quality by reducing the flicker level
as they filter out the low harmonics and limit the short-circuit power.
Disadvantage of generating high harmonic currents on the grid.

Power electronics include devices such as soft-starters (and capacitor banks), rectifiers,
inverters and frequency converters.

The basic elements of power converters

 Diodes (uncontrollable valves): Diodes conduct current in one direction and will
block current in the reverse direction.
 Electronic switches (controllable valves): Electronic switches allow the selection of
the exact moment when the diodes start conducting the current
 conventional or switchable thyristors and transistors: A conventional thyristor
can be switched on by its gate and will block only when there is a zero crossing of the
current (i.e. when the direction of the current is reversing), whereas switchable
thyristors and transistors can freely use the gate to interrupt the current.

The most widely known switchable thyristors and transistors are

 Gate Turn-Off (GTO) Thyristors,
 Integrated Gate Commutated Thyristors (IGCTs),
 Bipolar Junction Transistors (BJTs),
 Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (MOSFETs) And
 Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors (IGBTs).
The switching frequency defines the operational frequency range.
Conventional thyristors can control active power, while switchable thyristors and transistors
can control both active and reactive power.

Today, variable-speed wind turbine generator systems can use many different types of
converters. They can be characterised as either
 grid-commutated or
 self-commutated converters
The common type of grid-commutated converter is a thyristor
 It is cheap and reliable,
 But it consumes reactive power and
 Produces current harmonics that are difficult to filter out.
Typical self-commutated converters consist of either GTO thyristors or transistors.
Self-commutated converters are interesting because
 They have high switching frequencies.
 Harmonics can be filtered out more easily and thus their disturbances to the network
can be reduced to low levels.
Today the most common transistor is the IGBT.
 The typical switching frequency of an IGBT lies in the range of 2 to 20kHz.
 GTO converters cannot reach switching frequencies higher than about 1kHz;
therefore, they are not an option for the future.
Self-commutated converters are either voltage source converters (VSCs) or current source
converters (CSCs)They can control both the frequency and the voltage.

Fig: Types of self-commutated power converters for wind turbines: (a) a current source
converter and (b) a voltage source converter
VSCs and CSCs supply a relatively well-defined switched voltage waveform and a current
waveform, respectively, at the terminals of the generator and the grid.
 In the case of a VSC, the voltage in the energy storage (the DC bus) is kept constant
by a large capacitor.
 In a CSC, it is just the opposite; the current in the energy storage (the DC bus) is kept
constant by a large inductor.
 It has to be stressed that voltage source conversion and current source conversion are
different concepts.
 They can be implemented in several ways:
 Six-step,
 Pulse amplitude modulated (PAM) or
 Pulse width modulated (PWM).
By using the PWM technique, the low-frequency harmonics are eliminated and the frequency
of the first higher-order harmonics lie at about the switching frequency of the inverter or
rectifier.

Advantages
 Components can handle higher current and voltage ratings,
 The power losses decrease and the devices become more reliable.
 very easy to control with a megascale power amplification.
 The price/power ratio is still decreasing,
 Power converters are becoming more and more attractive as a means of improving the
performance of wind turbines.

Soft-starter
 Simple and cheap power electrical component used in fixed-speed wind turbines
during their connection to the grid (Types A and B).
 Reduce the in-rush current, thereby limiting the disturbances to the grid.
 Without a soft-starter, the in-rush current can be up to 7–8 times the rated current,
which can cause severe voltage disturbances on the grid.
 The soft-starter contains two thyristors as commutation devices in each phase. They
are connected antiparallel for each phase. The smooth connection of the generator to
the grid, during a predefined number of grid periods, is achieved by adjusting the
firing angle (α) of the thyristors.
 The relationship between the firing angle (α) and the resulting amplification of the
soft-starter is highly nonlinear and is additionally a function of the power factor of the
connected element.
 After the in-rush, the thyristors are bypassed in order to reduce the losses of the
overall system.

Capacitor bank
 The capacitor bank is used in fixed-speed or limited variable-speed wind turbines
(Types A and B).
 It is an electrical component that supplies reactive power to the induction generator.
Thus the reactive power absorbed by the generator from the grid is minimised.
 The generators of wind turbines can have a full load dynamic compensation, where a
certain number of capacitors are connected or disconnected continuously, depending
 on the average reactive power demand of the generator over a predefined period of
time.
 The capacitor banks are usually mounted at the bottom of the tower or to the nacelle
(i.e. at the top of the wind turbine).
 They may be heavy loaded and damaged in the case of overvoltage on the grid and
thereby may increase the maintenance cost of the system.

Rectifiers and Inverters

A traditional frequency converter, also called an adjustable speed drive, consists of:
 a rectifier (as AC-to-DC conversion unit) to converts alternating current into direct
current, while the energy flows into the DC system;
 energy storage (capacitors);
 an inverter (DC-to-AC with controllable frequency and voltage) to convert direct
current into alternating current, while the energy flows to the AC side.
Diodes can be used only in rectification mode, whereas electronic switches can be used in the
rectifying as well as in the inverting mode.
The most common rectifier solution is the diode rectifier, because of its simplicity, its low
cost and low losses. It is nonlinear in nature and, consequently, it generates harmonic
currents.
Another drawback is that it allows only a unidirectional power flow; it cannot control the
generator voltage or current.
Therefore, it can be used only with a generator that can control the voltage and with an
inverter (e.g. an IGBT) that can control the current.
The thyristor (grid-commutated) based inverter solution is a cheap inverter, with low losses
and, as its name indicates, it needs to be connected to the grid to be able to operate.
Unfortunately, it consumes reactive power and produces large harmonics.

The increasing demands on power quality make thyristor inverters less attractive than self-
commutated inverters, such as GTO inverters and IGBTs.

The advantage of a GTO inverter is that it can handle more power than the IGBT, but this
feature will be less important in the future, because of the fast development of IGBTs.
The disadvantage of GTOs is that the control circuit of the GTO valve is more complicated.

The generator and the rectifier must be selected as a combination (i.e. a complete solution),
while the inverter can be selected almost independently of the generator and the rectifier.

 A diode rectifier or a thyristor rectifier can be used together only with a synchronous
generator, as it does not require a reactive magnetising current.
 As opposed to this, GTO and IGBT rectifiers have to be used together with variable-
speed induction generators, because they are able to control the reactive power.
However, even though IGBTs are a very attractive choice, they have the disadvantages of a
high price and high losses.
 The synchronous generator with a diode rectifier, for example, has a much lower total
cost than the equivalent induction generator with an IGBT inverter or rectifier.

There are different ways to combine a rectifier and an inverter into a frequency converter.
There are five applicable technologies for adjustable speed: back-to-back, multilevel, tandem,
matrix and resonant.
Frequency Converters
 Back-to-back converters;
 Multilevel converters;
 Tandem converters;
 Matrix converters;
 Resonant converters.

Back-to-Back Converters
 The most widely used three-phase frequency converter.
 Bidirectional power converter consisting of two conventional pulse-width modulated
(PWM) VSC converters.
 The DC link voltage is boosted to a level higher than the amplitude of the grid line-to-
line voltage in order to achieve full control of the grid current.
 The presence of the boost inductance reduces the demands on the input harmonic
filter and offers some protection for the converter against abnormal conditions on the
grid.

Figure: Structure of the back-to-back frequency converter

The capacitor between the inverter and rectifier makes it possible to decouple the control of
the two inverters, allowing the compensation of asymmetry on both the generator side and the
grid side, without affecting the other side of the converter.
The power flow at the grid-side converter is controlled to keep the DC link voltage constant,
and the control of the generator-side converter is set to suit the magnetisation demand and the
desired rotor speed.

The presence of the DC link capacitor in a back-to-back converter reduces the overall lifetime
and efficiency of the system compared with a converter without a DC link capacitor, such as
the matrix converter.
 However, the protection of the matrix converter in a fault situation is not as good as
that of the back-to-back converter.
 Another aspect of the back-to-back converter is the high switching losses compared
with the switching losses of the matrix converter.
 The disadvantages of the matrix converter compared with the back-to-back converter
are higher conduction losses and the limitation of the output voltage converter.
In comparison with converters with constant DC link voltage and only two output levels, the
output harmonic content of the matrix converter is lower because of the fact that the output
voltage of the matrix converter is composed of three voltage levels.
However, considering the harmonic performance, the multilevel converter excels by being
the converter with the lowest demands on the input filters and therefore with the best spectra
on both the grid side and the generator side.

Generator-converter integration configurations

 Wind farms of size hundreds of megawatts of power capacity will often be connected
directly to the transmission grid and will, sooner or later, replace conventional power
plants.
This means that the wind turbines will be required to have power plant characteristics
namely, to be able to behave as active controllable components in the power system.
 Such large wind farms will be expected to meet very high technical demands,
 such as to perform frequency and voltage control,
 to regulate active and reactive power and to provide quick responses
during transient and dynamic situations in the power system.
The traditional wind turbines, where the active power is controlled by a simple pitching of the
blades or by using a dumping device or by disconnecting the wind turbines, do not have such
control capabilities and cannot contribute to power system stability as will be required.
Storage technologies may be an option, too, but at the present such technologies are rather
expensive. Also, they are not a satisfactory solution in the case of large wind farms, because
of voltage stability issues. Power electronic technology will therefore become more and more
attractive for large wind farms that will have to fulfil future high demands.

Presently, there are significant research activities to develop the electrical control layout of
such wind farms with different types of power electronic converters in order for them to be
able to comply with the high requirements and to be as cheap as possible to install.

Depending on how the power electronic devices are used inside a wind farm, there are several
different topology options, each with its particular advantages and disadvantages.
The topology can include the following
 A completely decentralised control structure with an internal AC network connected
to the main grid, with each turbine in the wind farm having its own frequency
converter and its own control system, has the advantage that each wind turbine can
operate at its optimum level with respect to its local wind conditions.
 A partly centralised, partly decentralised control structure where the power converter
is ‘split up’ and the output of each turbine is locally rectified and fed into a DC
network, with the whole farm still connected through a central inverter, which suggest
use of a multipole high voltage synchronous generator with permanent magnets.
This configuration provides all the features of the variable-speed concept, since each wind
turbine can be controlled independently. The generators could be SCIGs as well, if a VSC
were used as rectifier.
 A completely centralised control structure has a central power electronic converter
connected at the wind farm’s connection point. The turbines either could have SCIGs
or could have WRSGs.
 o Advantage: the internal behaviour of the wind turbines is separated from the
grid behaviour, and thus the wind farm is robust to possible failures of the
grid.
o Disadvantage: all wind turbines are rotating with the same average angular
speed and not at an individual optimal speed, thereby giving up some of the
features of the variable-speed concept, for each individual wind turbine.
 An option of this concept is the centralised reactive power compensation topology
with an advanced static VAR compensation (ASVC) unit. Reactive power
compensation units are widely used in power systems in order to provide the reactive
power balance and to improve voltage stability. ASVCs are inverters based on self-
commutated switches (i.e., with full, continuous control of the reactive power).
o Advantage: in the case of a voltage decrease (e.g., during a grid fault) their
available maximum reactive power decreases more slowly compared with
the static VAR compensation (SVC) units.
 Another option is the use of a high-voltage DC (HVDC) link as power transmission.
All wind turbines are connected to the same power converter, and the entire wind
farm is connected to the public supply grid through another power converter. These
two converters are connected to each other through a long, HVDC link cable.