Complementary Power Control for Doubly Fed Induction Generator-Based Tidal Stream Turbine Generation Plants

Khaoula Ghefiri, Soufiene Bouallègue, Izaskun Garrido, Aitor J. Garrido and Joseph Haggège
Additional contact information
Khaoula Ghefiri: Laboratory of Research in Automatic Control—LA.R.A, National Engineering School of Tunis (ENIT), University of Tunis El Manar (UTM), BP 37, Le Belvédère, 1002 Tunis, Tunisia
Soufiene Bouallègue: Laboratory of Research in Automatic Control—LA.R.A, National Engineering School of Tunis (ENIT), University of Tunis El Manar (UTM), BP 37, Le Belvédère, 1002 Tunis, Tunisia
Izaskun Garrido: Automatic Control Group—ACG, Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, Engineering School of Bilbao, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), 48012 Bilbao, Spain
Aitor J. Garrido: Automatic Control Group—ACG, Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, Engineering School of Bilbao, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), 48012 Bilbao, Spain
Joseph Haggège: Laboratory of Research in Automatic Control—LA.R.A, National Engineering School of Tunis (ENIT), University of Tunis El Manar (UTM), BP 37, Le Belvédère, 1002 Tunis, Tunisia

Energies, 2017, vol. 10, issue 7, 1-23

Abstract: The latest forecasts on the upcoming effects of climate change are leading to a change in the worldwide power production model, with governments promoting clean and renewable energies, as is the case of tidal energy. Nevertheless, it is still necessary to improve the efficiency and lower the costs of the involved processes in order to achieve a Levelized Cost of Energy (LCoE) that allows these devices to be commercially competitive. In this context, this paper presents a novel complementary control strategy aimed to maximize the output power of a Tidal Stream Turbine (TST) composed of a hydrodynamic turbine, a Doubly-Fed Induction Generator (DFIG) and a back-to-back power converter. In particular, a global control scheme that supervises the switching between the two operation modes is developed and implemented. When the tidal speed is low enough, the plant operates in variable speed mode, where the system is regulated so that the turbo-generator module works in maximum power extraction mode for each given tidal velocity. For this purpose, the proposed back-to-back converter makes use of the field-oriented control in both the rotor side and grid side converters, so that a maximum power point tracking-based rotational speed control is applied in the Rotor Side Converter (RSC) to obtain the maximum power output. Analogously, when the system operates in power limitation mode, a pitch angle control is used to limit the power captured in the case of high tidal speeds. Both control schemes are then coordinated within a novel complementary control strategy. The results show an excellent performance of the system, affording maximum power extraction regardless of the tidal stream input.

Keywords: Doubly-Fed Induction Generator (DFIG); energy harvesting; Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT); ocean energy; power control; power converters; Tidal Stream Turbine (TST) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/7/862/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/7/862/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:10:y:2017:i:7:p:862-:d:102913

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().