Certain investigations on soft switching converter for wind energy conversion system

Abstract

Wind energy system plays a vital role in non-conventional energy sources in India. Wind energy constitutes the most significant share among the renewable energy pie in India with about 37% share of the renewable basket. Among the various types of generators such as Induction generator, Doubly fed induction generator and permanent magnet synchronous generators for wind energy conversion, in this research permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) is considered for its maximum efficiency, minimum losses, smaller size, minimum maintenance, high reliability and the capability to work without a gearbox. Maximum Power Point Tracking is a significant control system in a Wind Energy Conversion System (WECS) to extract maximum energy from a wind energy source and to regulate the converter voltage. Active rectifier and improved DC-DC converter with efficient controllers are proposed in this work to effectively utilize the power generated by the wind energy system. In this research to attain required output voltage various converters such as half bridge, full bridge, Dual active bridge, single stage Resonant Switched Capacitor (RSC), two stage RSC and three stage RSC converters are studied in the aspect of voltage gain, number of active devices, number of passive devices and utilization of transformer. In the recent times, the Switched-Capacitor (SC) DC/DC converters have attracted significant interest in the area of high power applications due to their high power density, high efficiency and simple control. In this analysis, three stage high gain resonant switched capacitor DC/DC converter is proposed for high power grid newline