Reliable and cost-effective wind farm control strategy for offshore wind turbines

The power converter is among the most vulnerable wind turbine components. It is thus important to improve its reliability, especially when wind turbines are offshore because they are often exposed to severe weather conditions. A wind turbine is normally regulated using a dedicated controller, coupled with a power converter, but the control strategy proposed here requires a group (or cluster) of turbines to share a controller/converter between several turbines. The shared controller/converter would be placed somewhere more accessible, such as a substation. The potential benefits include improved reliability of each turbine due to the simplification (having removed its vulnerable power converter) and greater energy yield as a result of improved accessibility (which would lead to reduced downtime). The Matlab/Simulink model of Supergen Wind 5 MW exemplar wind turbine is employed to simulate each turbine. In order to simulate a cluster of multiple turbines, each Supergen model is first discretised and, in turn, converted to C to reduce the simulation time, ensuring at the same time that the complexity of each turbine model is not compromised.