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

提出的技术目标是提高直接驱动风力涡轮机的可靠性，降低资本和维护成本。在目前的市场中，由于钕铁硼永磁材料的高成本和不稳定的价格，降低成本的发电机和更可靠的变流器系统将对直驱风力发电机产生重大的商业影响。拟议的技术将减少对进口和高度不稳定的PM材料市场的依赖。拟议的技术将导致现有PM发生器的体积和重量的大幅减少，同时所需PM材料的数量也会减少。此外，通过消除易发生故障的直流母线电解电容器，提高了系统的可靠性。这些技术的改进将降低风力涡轮机的资本成本和维护成本，并将减少风力涡轮机的停机时间。这些改进将对风力涡轮机制造和公用事业行业都非常有益。该项目的主要目标是寻找将低压永磁发电机（PM）技术商业化的可能途径，用于直接驱动风力涡轮机。本文提出的风能转换系统采用三相单级升压逆变器代替常用的电压源逆变器作为功率变换器。这种新颖的功率转换器将功率从低直流电压传输到高得多的三相交流电压。这种功率转换器的引入允许直接驱动涡轮机中的PM发电机产生更低的电压，从而增加了发电机设计过程的灵活性，从而允许设计师更具创新性，并有可能允许直接驱动风力涡轮机使用更便宜，更高效的发电机。在这项工作中，开发的系统的实验室规模将被原型化和测试，作为该项目的贡献之一。

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.