Comparison of two Passivity-Based Control Strategies for a Wind Power Generator

This paper considers a stand-alone power generation system, which is composed of a wind power generator, a PWM inverter and batteries. In order to ensure its power autonomy, a suitable controller has to be designed to manage the inverter, and then to make the generator work continually at its Maximum Power Point. Hence, an Euler-Lagrange modeling has been developed to describe the system by the way of its energy flows. By using it, two Euler-Lagrange Passivity-Based Controllers (PBC) with an incorporated Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) algorithm are then designed for the wind power generator: unlike only a proportional coefficient used in the first one's damping injection, an integrator is added to the second one's. Finally, their performance is compared by experiments: whereas both controllers can adapt themselves to angular speed variations, the second one maximizes power production more efficiently.