Real-Time Simulation of Grid-Connected Wind Farms Using Physical Aggregation

Abstract

The electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation of a power system interconnected with wind farms involves such intensive computations that fully digital real-time simulators are among the effective tools for performing such simulations. To practically exploit real-time simulators for the simulation of wind farms with numerous wind turbines, the application of aggregation techniques is inevitable. In this paper, a detailed EMT model of a grid-connected wind farm with ten doubly-fed-inductiongenerator-based General Electric 1.5-MW wind turbines has been implemented on an advanced PC-Cluster-based real-time simulator. Three levels of physical aggregation methods are presented to reduce the computational efforts of the real-time simulation while maintaining adequate accuracy. A combination of these aggregation methods with parallel processing allowed the real-time simulation to be carried out with a fixed time step of 50 μs and high accuracy. Various fault transient results are provided for all the aggregation levels and compared against results from the detailed wind farm model. The validity of the proposed methods and real-time simulation results has also been confirmed by comparing with offline simulation results in MATLAB/SIMULINK.

High Performance Reduced Order Models for Wind Turbines with Full-Scale Converters Applied on Grid Interconnection Studies

“…While in commercial software packages, such as MATLAB (MathWorks, Natick, MA, USA), Power Factory (DigSilent, Gomaringen, Germany), Electromagnetic Transients Program (EMTP) and others, a simulation of a WPP with 50 generators during 10 s can demand many hours of computer processing, the same simulation on an RTDS will take only 10 s. Another advantage of real-time simulators is their capability to communicate with hardware, allowing design, testing and validation under operational conditions before being placed in the field [19]. The main drawback of RTDS devices is their cost, which is much higher than personal computers.…”

“…A successful simplified model will reduce the simulation time without significantly compromising on the accuracy of the results in comparison to the detailed model [1,19].…”

“…The Integral of Squared Error (ISE), Equation (19), and the Integral of Absolute Error (IAE), Equation (20), are two performance indexes used in control parameter tuning. ISE penalizes large differences between models.…”

Real-time simulation on wind power system dynamics incorporating STATCOM

“…Most of existing studies on the simulation pertinent to wind power mainly focus on off-line simulation which has to go through a long research period and low efficiency. By contrast, an advanced real-time simulation platform, the Real-Time Laboratory(RT-LAB) developed by Opal-RT Technologies has the functions of real-time simulation, hardware in the loop simulation and online parameter adjustment [8], which can shorten the research period and has good economical efficiency.…”

Modeling and Real-Time Simulation of Wind Farm

“…RT-LAB can also connect physical devices to the simulation system to make the simulation closer to the reality and get more convincing results. References [7,8,9,10] have addressed the achievements of applying RT-LAB in the simulation of wind farms. However, more studies on how to realize the real-time simulation of wind farm using RT-LAB need to be carried out further.…”