Low Cost Wind Turbine Energy Maximizer

Abstract

Wind generation systems generate variable voltages at variable frequency because of variable wind speeds. Wind turbines exhibit non linear power characteristics at load variations and have power peak at certain speed of the wind turbine. Because of variable nature of output power at variable wind flow' speeds, it is not practical to use the power output directly to any load . Rather. the Variable a power from the wind generator is stored in a storage battery using an interface converter The battery then supplies power to the desired load or utility using an inverted. We aimed at constructing an interface converter that would always extract maximum power from the wind generator within the battery capacity limit. A lead acid battery wnth a nominal voltage of 12V will be charged according to IEC 60896 . . -: Ie ua 'tng the maximum po\\'er from the wind generator, if the main battery becomes unable to store the whole power, the rest power will be diverted to a secondary storage battery. In case of low wind speed, the secondary storage power may be pumped to the main battery if situation permits. Firstly we proposed a scheme which will provide all necessary protections to safeguard different components in the whole system under abnormal conditions. New topology of buck boost operation with a common ground and novel ideas of driving floating power MOSFETs, will be incorporated in the converter design. This report includes the test results of charging a 12V, 70Ah Lead Acid Battery at various charging states with our proposed circuitry.