Development of a Marine Current Turbine Simulator Based on HILS Concept

This paper is a contribution to the development of a real time simulator conceived for the study of the marine current energy conversion. We presented the structure of a real time marine current turbine simulator based on "hardware-in the-loop" (HILS) simulation techniques. The main components of this physical simulator are: an electromechanical sub-system (ES) and an informatics sub-system (IS). The ES is composed from three electrical drives: an asynchronous motor that emulates the marine turbine, an asynchronous generator, used to study the energy conversion and grid connection, and an active break, which develops extra loads and variable moment of inertia. The IS is a supervising and control subsystem and is composed from a computational unit and different interface devices.