Optimal Control of an Autonomous Variable-speed Wind Generation System Based on a Bacterial Foraging Optimization Technique

Abstract-A developed control strategy for an isolated wind generation unit is presented. The proposed system mainly consists of an induction generator driven by a wind turbine, synchronous machine, consumer load, discrete dump load, and gate turn-off thyristor based power electronics converter. Two control loops are used in this study. The first regulates the load bus voltage based on the excitation control of the synchronous machine. The second simultaneously controls the dump load to absorb excessive power generation, in turn regulating the frequency of the proposed power system. Two optimization techniques based on the bacterial foraging algorithm and genetic algorithm are used to tune the proposed control parameters. The proposed system is tested for turbulent change in wind speed and step change in consumer load. The complete system is modeled and simulated using a MATLAB/Simulink software package (The MathWorks, Natick, Massachusetts, USA). The performance of the optimized control system is compared with the conventional proportional-integral-derivative control system. The simulation results show that the optimized control system has good performance, with less settling time and less overshoot compared to the case of a conventional proportional-integral-derivative controller.