Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Electrical Engineering

First Advisor

Enrico Santi

Abstract

Nowadays, it is well-understood that the burning of fossil fuels in electric power station has a significant influence on the global climate due to greenhouse gases. In many countries, the use of cost-effective and reliable low-carbon electricity energy sources is becoming an important energy policy. Among different kinds of clean energy resources- such as solar power, hydro-power, ocean wave power and so on, wind power is the fastest-growing form of renewable energy at the present time. Moreover, adjustable speed generator wind turbines (ASGWT) has key advantages over the fixed-speed generator wind turbines (FSGWT) in terms of less mechanical stress, improved power quality, high system efficiency, and reduced acoustic noise. One important class of ASGWT is the doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG), which has gained a significant attention of the electric power industry due to their advantages over the other class of ASGWT, i.e. fully rated converter-based wind turbines. Because of increased integration of DFIG-based wind farms into electric power grids, it is necessary to transmit the generated power from wind farms to the existing grids via transmission networks without congestion. Series capacitive compensation of DFIG-based wind farm is an economical way to increase the power transfer capability of the transmission line connecting wind farm to the grid. For example, a study performed by ABB reveals that increasing the power transfer capability of an existing transmission line from 1300 MW to 2000 MW using series compensation is 90% less than the cost of building a new transmission line. However, a factor hindering the extensive use of series capacitive compensation is the potential risk of sub- synchronous resonance (SSR). The SSR is a condition where the wind farm exchanges energy with the electric network, to which it is connected, at one or more natural frequencies of the electric or mechanical part of the combined system, comprising the wind farm and the network, and the frequency of the exchanged energy is below the fundamental frequency of the system. This phenomenon may cause severe damage in the wind farm, if not prevented. Therefore, this dissertation deals with the SSR phenomena in a capacitive series compensated wind farm. A DFIG-based wind farm, which is connected to a series compensated transmission line, is considered as a case study. The small-signal stability analysis of the system is presented, and the eigenvalues of the system are obtained. Using both modal analysis and time-domain simulation, it is shown that the system is potentially unstable due to the SSR mode. Then, three different possibilities for the addition of SSR damping controller (SSRDC) are investigated. The SSRDC can be added to (1) gate-controlled series capacitor (GCSC), (2) thyristor-controlled series capacitor (TCSC), or (3) DFIG rotor-side converter (RSC) and grid-side converter (GSC) controllers. The first and second cases are related to the series flexible AC transmission systems (FACTS) family, and the third case uses the DFIG back-to-back converters to damp the SSR. The SSRDC is designed using residue-based analysis and root locus diagrams. Using residue-based analysis, the optimal input control signal (ICS) to the SSRDC is identified that can damp the SSR mode without destabilizing other modes, and using root-locus analysis, the required gain for the SSRDC is determined. Moreover, two methods are discussed in order to estimate the optimum input signal to the SSRDC, without measuring it directly. In this dissertation, MATLAB/Simulink is used as a tool for modeling and design of the SSRDC, and PSCAD/EMTDC is used to perform time-domain simulation in order to verify the design process.

Rights

© 2014, Hossein A Mohammadpour

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