Integrated Optimal Design of a Passive Wind Turbine System: An Experimental Validation

Abstract

This work presents design and experimentation of a full passive wind turbine system without the active electronic part (power and control). The efficiency of such a device can be obtained only if the system design parameters are mutually adapted through an integrated optimal design method. This approach, based on multiobjective optimization, aims at concurrently optimizing the wind power extraction and the global system losses for a given wind speed profile while reducing the weight of the wind turbine generator. It allows us to obtain the main characteristics (geometric and energetic features) of the optimal Permanent Magnet Synchronous Generator (PMSG) for the passive wind turbine. Finally, experiments on the PMSG prototype built from this work show a good agreement with theoretical predictions. This validates the design approach and confirms the effectiveness of such a passive device.