Application Of Superconductors To Improve

Abstract

With ever increasing demand of electricity and depleting conventional energy sources with their environmental concerns, renewable energy sources are an excellent alternative for producing clean energy. Among many renewable energy sources, wind energy has huge potential to contribute part of energy demand. However, as a result of unprecedented integration of wind energy in low voltage and high voltage grids, ensuring stability and power quality following grid codes is a challenge lately. Wind Energy Conversion System (WECS) suffers from two main problems, 1) fluctuations in output power due to unpredictable behavior of wind, and 2) retention of connection during grid faults. The optimal solution to increase Fault Ride Through (FRT) capability and smoothing of output power fluctuations in PMSG based WECS is still a point of research in literature. In this research Work, the application of superconductors to enhance the performance of Permanent Magnet Synchronous Generator (PMSG) based WECS is investigated. The presented work considers optimal integration of Superconducting Coil (SC) with PMSG based WECS. Fractional Order PI (FOPI) control is used for control of SC circuit. Harmony Search (HS) optimization technique is used for finding optimum parameter values of the SC and FOPI controllers. The proposed strategy is then compared with PI based control of SC for disturbance in the form of wind gust and grid fault.