Performance analysis of wind turbine-driven permanent magnet generator with matrix converter

Wind energy, among all of the renewable energy sources, has made rapid developments and significant inroads in electrical power systems. With the increased use of wind energy conversion systems (WECSs), several technologies have been developed. Since WECSs are more cost competitive, the comparison of different wind generator systems is the need of the hour. Permanent magnet generators employing these technologies have some significant advantages over conventional generators, such as no need of excitation, low volume and weight, high precision, and deletion of the gearbox. A variable-speed WECS with a permanent magnet generator and a matrix converter is proposed in this paper. The traditional power conversion stages consist of a rectifier followed by an inverter and bulky DC link capacitor. It involves 2 stages of power conversion and, subsequently, the efficiency of the overall WECS is reduced because of power quality issues mainly based on total harmonic distortion. The matrix converter is mainly utilized to control the output voltage and frequency, and its input current and output voltage are closer to a sine wave. The matrix converter is a simple and compact AC-AC converter. The proposed WECS with matrix converter is modeled using PSIM and results were checked with an experimental setup.