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

I-Corps 团队：新型直驱风能系统

• 批准号: 1565659
• 负责人: Behrooz Mirafzal
• 金额: $ 5万
• 依托单位: Kansas State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-10-15 至 2017-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1565659&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Corps; Team; Novel; Direct; Drive

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.

所提出技术的目标是提高直驱风力涡轮机的可靠性并降低资本和维护成本。在当前市场上，由于钕铁硼永磁（PM）材料成本高且价格不稳定，降低发电机成本并配备更可靠的变流器系统将对直驱风力发电机产生重大商业影响。所提出的技术将减少对进口和高度不稳定的粉末冶金材料市场的依赖。所提出的技术将大幅减少现有永磁发电机的体积和重量，同时减少所需永磁材料的数量。此外，通过消除容易发生故障的直流母线电解电容器，系统可靠性得到提高。这些技术改进将降低风力涡轮机的资本成本和维护成本，并减少风力涡轮机的停机时间。这些增强功能对于风力涡轮机制造和公用事业行业都非常有利。该项目的主要目标是寻找将直驱风力涡轮机低压永磁 (PM) 发电机技术商业化的可能方法。所提出的风能转换系统引入三相单级升压逆变器作为功率转换器来代替常用的电压源逆变器。这种新颖的电源转换器将电力从低直流电压传输到更高的三相交流电压。这种功率转换器的引入使直驱风力涡轮机中的永磁发电机能够产生较低的电压，从而增加了发电机设计过程的灵活性，从而使设计人员能够更具创新性，并有可能允许直驱风力涡轮机使用更便宜、更高效的发电机。在这项工作中，将对所开发系统的实验室规模进行原型设计并进行测试，作为该项目的贡献之一。