Fault Ride through Capability Analysis (FRT) in Wind Power Plants with Doubly Fed Induction Generators for Smart Grid Technologies

Faults in electrical networks are among the key factors and sources of network disturbances. Control and automation strategies are among the key fault clearing techniques responsible for the safe operation of the system. Several researchers have revealed various constraints of control and automation strategies such as a slow dynamic response, the inability to switch the network on and off remotely, a high fault clearing time and loss minimization. For a system with wind energy technologies, if the power flow of a wind turbine is perturbed by a fault, the intermediate circuit voltage between the machine side converter and line side converter will rise to unacceptably high values due to the accumulation of energy in the DC link capacitor. To overcome the aforementioned issues, this paper used MATLAB simulations and experiments to analyze and validate the results. The results revealed that fault ride through capability with Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) viewer software, Active Servo software and wind sim packages are more adaptable to the variations of voltage sag, voltage swell and wind speed and avoid loss of synchronism and improve power quality. Furthermore, for protection purposes, a DC chopper and a crowbar should be incorporated into the management of excess energy during faults and a ferrite device included for the reduction of the electromagnetic field.