A Real-Time Heterogeneous Emulator of a High-Fidelity Utility-Scale Variable-Speed Variable-Pitch Wind Turbine

Wind energy has the highest development rates of renewables. The increasing complexity of wind turbine (WT) systems requires careful analysis and design with thorough testing and certification procedures. Hardware emulators contribute to safe and cost-effective assessment and testing of WT in research and industry. Most of the available emulators concentrate on emulating electrical subsystems with simplified mechanical models. In this paper, a real-time (RT) heterogeneous emulator that combines RT discrete-time step simulation and a high-fidelity linear parameter-varying model of a utility-scale WT system is proposed and implemented on a heterogeneous CPU/GPU platform. The RT emulator is built on an embedded NVIDIA Jetson TK1 board for a National Renewable Energy Laboratory 5-MW WT as a case study. The proposed emulator is capable of further integration of electrical models and control systems of WT.