Communication Network Architectures for Smart-Wind Power Farms

Mohamed A. Ahmed and Young-Chon Kim
Additional contact information
Mohamed A. Ahmed: Department of Computer Engineering, Chonbuk National University, Jeonju 561-756, Korea
Young-Chon Kim: Smart Grid Research Center, Chonbuk National University, Jeonju 561-756, Korea

Energies, 2014, vol. 7, issue 6, 1-22

Abstract: Developments in the wind power industry have enabled a new generation of wind turbines with longer blades, taller towers, higher efficiency, and lower maintenance costs due to the maturity of related technologies. Nevertheless, wind turbines are still blind machines because the control center is responsible for managing and controlling individual wind turbines that are turned on or off according to demand for electricity. In this paper, we propose a communication network architecture for smart-wind power farms (Smart-WPFs). The proposed architecture is designed for wind turbines to communicate directly and share sensing data in order to maximize power generation, WPF availability, and turbine efficiency. We also designed a sensor data frame structure to carry sensing data from different wind turbine parts such as the rotor, transformer, nacelle, etc. The data frame includes a logical node ID (LNID), sensor node ID (SNID), sensor type (ST), and sensor data based on the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61400-25 standard. We present an analytical model that describes upstream traffic between the wind turbines and the control center. Using a queueing theory approach, the upstream traffic is evaluated in view of bandwidth utilization and average queuing delay. The performance of the proposed network architectures are evaluated by using analytical and simulation models.

Keywords: wind turbine; communication network; smart-wind power farms (Smart-WPFs); International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61400-25; wireless; ZigBee; Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) (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: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/7/6/3900/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/7/6/3900/ (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:7:y:2014:i:6:p:3900-3921:d:37377

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 ().