The rapid development of wind generation technology has boosted types of the new topology wind turbines. Among the recently invented new wind turbines, the front-end speed regulated (FSR) wind turbine has attracted a lot of attention. Unlike conventional wind turbine, the speed regulation of the FSR machines is realized by adjusting the guide vane angle of a hydraulic torque converter, which is converterless and much more grid-friendly as the electrically excited synchronous generator (EESG) is also adopted. Therefore, the drive chain control of the wind turbine owns the top priority. To ensure that the FSR wind turbine performs as a general synchronous generator, this paper firstly modeled the drive chain and then proposed to use the variable-universe fuzzy approach for the drive chain control. It helps the wind generator operate in a synchronous speed and outperform other types of wind turbines. The multipopulation genetic algorithm (MPGA) is adopted to intelligently optimize the parameters of the expansion factor of the designed variable-universe fuzzy controller (VUFC). The optimized VUFC is applied to the speed control of the drive chain of the FSR wind turbine, which effectively solves the contradiction between the low precision of the fuzzy controller and the number of rules in the fuzzy control and the control accuracy. Finally, the main shaft speed of the FSR wind turbine can reach a steady-state value around 1500 rpm. The response time of the results derived using VUFC, compared with that derived from a neural network controller, is only less than 0.5 second and there is no overshoot. The case study with the real machine parameter verifies the effectiveness of the proposal and results compared with conventional neural network controller, proving its outperformance.
Neural network controller based induction generator for wind turbine applications