Optimisation of switched reluctance generator for wind energy application

Abstract

This paper presents as a new contribution a methodology to control firing angles of switched reluctance generator (SRG) in order to maximize wind power extraction and also efficiency of generator. In the proposed method, optimum turn-on and turn-off angles in offline mode were attained based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to control the system online with linear interpolation. The main features of the present scenario include simple structure, low executing time, and reasonable convergence rate which is independent from machine characteristics (regardless to the highly nonlinear behavior of SRG) and simultaneously investigates the firing angles. In order to consider more realistic conditions, copper losses, switching and conduction losses of semiconductors were included in the simulations. Ultimately, Matlab was used to perform the proposed method on typical three-phase 6/4 generator and the results confirm the validation of the proposed methodology.