I-Corps Team: A Novel Direct Drive Wind Energy System

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The objective of the proposed technology is to enhance the reliability and reduce the capital and maintenance costs of direct-drive wind turbines. In the current market, with high cost and unstable price of NdFeB Permanent Magnet (PM) material being a concern, a reduced cost generator with the more reliable converter system will have a significant commercial impact on the direct-drive wind turbines. The proposed technology will result in less dependency on the imported and highly unstable market of PM materials. The proposed technology will lead to a substantial reduction in the volume and weight of the existing PM generators along with decrease in the amount of required PM material. Furthermore, the system reliability is increased by elimination of the failure prone DC-bus electrolytic capacitors. These technological enhancements will lead to lower the capital cost as well as the maintenance cost of wind turbines and will reduce the downtime of wind turbines. These enhancements will be highly beneficial for both the wind turbine manufacturing and utility industries.The primary goal of this project is to find possible approaches on commercializing the technology of low-voltage Permanent Magnet (PM) generator for direct-drive wind turbines. The proposed wind energy conversion system introduces a three-phase single-stage boost inverter as the power converter in place of the commonly used voltage source inverter. This novel power converter transfers power from a low DC voltage to a much higher three-phase AC voltage. The introduction of such power converter allows the PM generator in a direct-drive turbine to produce a lower voltage, thereby adding flexibility to the generator design process, hence allowing designers to be more innovative and potentially allowing direct-drive wind turbines to use cheaper, more efficient generators. In this work, a laboratory-scale of the developed system will be prototyped and tested as one of the contributions of this project.