Evaluation of a Hardware-in-the-loop Test Setup Using Mechanical Measurements with a DFIG Wind Turbine Nacelle

The impact of system test benches on the development and validation of wind energy converters is significantly increasing, and that is due to the higher availability as well as the provided powerful actuator and emulation systems. However, the question remains to be answered about how consistent measurements in the laboratory are. Especially in the case where no field measurements are available for prototypes. The challenge in this regard is the unknown accuracy of simulations and the lack of an experimentally calibrated torque measurement in the hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) setup. The presented paper handles this topic and presents an evaluation method to elaborate measurement consistency independent from field tests. A transparent and comprehensive comparison is provided, taking advantage of the deterministic test environment enabled by the HiL system and the dedicated designed torque measurement adapter. Provided results demonstrate consistent measures obtained from the real-time simulation, HiL control system, and the electrical and mechanical measurements, where a low deviation of up to 2 % is partly observed.