Comparative Study between Flatness-Based and Field-Oriented Control Methods of a Grid-Connected Wind Energy Conversion System

Wind energy is an alternative to meet the growing energy demand. Control of wind turbines should help the reliability and stable operation of the power grid. Furthermore, they should respect the technical requirements according to the grid codes to inject the wind energy into the grid. In this paper, a well-known field-oriented control (FOC) method and a new control method based on the flatness properties (FBC) are presented and compared. These control methods are applied to a wind energy conversion system (WECS), which connects a variable-speed wind turbine (WT) based on a permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) to the grid via a back-to-back converter. The main aim of both control methods is to extract the maximum power from the wind. For this purpose, the mathematical model of each subsystem, i.e., WT, PMSG, and electrical grid, is presented. To evaluate and to compare the dynamic behavior of the high-power wind energy conversion system, it is modeled and the control strategies are developed using SimPowerSystems Toolbox in MATLAB. The simulation results obtained in the time domain show that the FBC performs better at managing the energy in the studied system. Indeed, the proposed FBC is a high bandwidth control method with only one closed-loop control, which leads to a high dynamic performance. Therefore, that strategy can be used to provide ancillary services such as frequency control and spinning reserves according to the grid codes.