Design and Control of a Single-Phase D-STATCOM Inverter for Wind Applications

Application of renewable energy systems has become very popular. Since most utilities do not track the end points of their distribution lines carefully, where most of the wind turbines are connected to the grid, increasing the application of renewable energies in utilities can result in problems for the whole system dynamics. This paper presents the design and control of a D-STATCOM inverter for small to mid-sized wind turbines (10kW-20kW) to solve the problem of power factor correction of the grid. The proposed D-STATCOM Inverter can control the VARs on each single feeder line while the output of the renewable energy source, especially wind, is varying. Active power is controlled by shifting the phase angle while reactive power control is achieved by modulation index control. Also, the inverter is able to eliminate a large amount of harmonics using the optimized harmonic stepped waveform (OHSW) technique. The proposed inverter utilizes the hybrid-clamped topology. All simulations were done in MATLAB/Simulink environment.