Laboratory set-up for wind turbine emulation

This paper presents a laboratory set-up to be used as wind turbine emulator. The emulator can be used for research applications to drive an electrical generator in a similar way as a wind turbine, by reproducing the torque developed by a wind turbine for a given wind velocity. Also, it can be used as an educational tool to teach the behaviour, operation and control of a wind turbine. In this work, the turbine torque is reproduced by a DC drive. A control program reads wind velocities from an input file and calculates torque reference to the DC drive. A commercial DC drive with torque control is used to apply the commanded torque to the shaft of the electrical generator. Both, stall wind turbines and pitch controlled wind turbines can be emulated in the laboratory set-up. The emulator reproduced not only the mean torque of the turbine but also the oscillating torque due to wind shear and tower shadow. This functionality of the emulator can be used to investigate the effect of these phenomena in power quality. Experimental results are given which show that the emulator is an useful tool for the purposes already mentioned.