Hardware-in-the-loop simulation and control for developing very large wind energy systems

Nowadays, simulation is a very important tool in order to design control systems of large wind turbines due to the fact that large complex wind turbines are not available as experimental set-up and down scaled systems show a completely different behaviour as the large ones. On the other hand, digital simulation is not enough to test control algorithms since the analysis of controllers in a real-time environment is essential. Hence, the combination of wind turbine simulation and direct digital real-time control becomes significant and this leads to the concept of Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) simulation and control. The present contribution proposes a Hardware-in-the-Loop configuration for the real-time simulation and control of large-sized wind turbines, where a well-known simulation tool is integrated with a control hardware that is often used in real wind turbines. Software and hardware choices are analysed, the implemented architecture is described and satisfactory results of a numerical experiment based on a 20 MW wind turbine is presented.