Determination of fault operation dynamical constraints for the design of wind turbine DFIG drives

This paper presents an efficient design tool for the estimation of the transient electromagnetic peak torque and transient rotor over-voltages of wind turbines (WT) doubly-fed induction generators (DFIG) during severe fault conditions on the grid side. This versatile and robust tool is well adapted to the implementation in a DFIG drives CAD environment using iterative optimization procedures. In such an application, it is used to compute the dynamical constraints function during the integrated design process of the whole drive including the generator, the gearbox and the power converters. Results show that it is necessary to take into account the dynamical constraints under fault operation, during the early steps of the system design process. Another application of the tool is also illustrated in the paper: the design of the protection system (i.e. the crowbar resistance) for a given generator, a given gearbox and a given power converter. © 2010 IMACS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.