WIND TURBINE GENERATOR CONTROLLER

On a team of three, I helped develop a proof of concept wind turbine control system. A prototype was developed to test and understand synchronous rectifier boost conversion. Wind energy generation is just one of the possible applications for such a control system. Concepts utilized in the project include synchronous rectification, boost conversion, pulse width modulation and brushless direct current (BLDC) motor commutation. The main focus for our project as using rectification to control the regenerative braking.

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The printed circuit board was designed using Eagle. Many of the components included were standard support hardware for the XMEGA 128A4U microcontroller such as a 16MHZ crystal oscillator, voltage regulators, resistors, and capacitors. We selected surface mounted components in an 0805 package for the majority of our passive components so that they could be easily soldered while still being compact. We used two voltage regulators to supply 3.3 volts to the microcontroller and anemometer, and 5 volts to the hall sensor signals. In order to direct power from the BLDC motor to a battery, we included three half bridge controllers that featured two MOSFETs each. These transistors were switched with digital output signals from the microcontroller, and supporting resistors were included for each of these signal lines. To allow for adequate heat transfer from the half bridge drivers, we included via arrays below the pad of the driver and under the power and ground pads.

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After writing code that successfully returned the approximate velocity of either the anemometer or the BLDC motor and creating a task to switch the half bridge MOSFETs at a given duty cycle, we began to implement much of Charlie Refvem’s brushless DC motor code (based on the block diagram below) to control and drive the motor based on current hall sensor and anemometer readings.

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The code never got debugged to the point of full functionality, but the hardware is tested and ready for future work should someone pick up the project.