The Matlab/Simulink model of the Supergen (Sustainable Power Generation and Supply) Wind 5 MW exemplar wind turbine, which has been employed by a number of researchers at various institutions and Universities over the last decade, is reported. It is subsequently improved, especially in speed, to facilitate wind farm modelling, which usually involves duplicating wind turbine models. The improvement is achieved through various stages, including prewarping, discretisation using Heun’s method in addition to Euler method, and conversion to C. Results are presented to demonstrate that improvement in speed is significant and that the resulting wind turbine model can be used for wind farm modelling more efficiently. It is important to highlight that improvement in speed is achieved without compromising the complexity of the turbine model; that is, each turbine included in a wind farm is neither simplified nor compromised. The use of the wind farm model for testing a wind farm controller that has recently been introduced is also demonstrated.

Introduction

The 2016 statistic publication by WindEurope reports that there are 153.7 GW of installed wind energy capacity in the European Union. With such high penetration of wind power, the power generated by wind farms can no longer simply be that dictated by the wind speed. The power output of some wind turbines is already being curtailed [1, 2]. It will be necessary for wind farms to provide services to the grid including spinning reserve, frequency support and assistance with supply-demand matching, which could be achieved by the use of an appropriate wind farm controller. In order to design a wind farm controller, an efficient wind farm model, which can be executed fast and is detailed at the same time, needs to be developed – this is the main objective of the work presented in this paper. In more detail, the Matlab/Simulink R (Matlab) model of the Supergen (Sustainable Power Generation and Supply) Wind 5 MW exemplar wind turbine includes modules of aerodynamics, blades dynamics, rotor dynamics, actuator dynamics, drive-train, tower dynamics, generator, etc. The 5 MW wind turbine model is selected because it is the largest wind turbine model available within the consortium. Currently, Matlab and Bladed models of the 8 MW exemplar wind turbine is being developed [3], and the work presented here will be applied to the 8 MW model once it becomes complete and available. The 5MW model was first introduced in 2000 [4], and has since been updated/improved and carefully validated/tuned using the high fidelity aero-elastic model, i.e. in DNV-GL Bladed (Bladed), of the same exemplar turbine. It is important to point out that in the wind energy sector, validation of a wind turbine model using aeroelastic software, such as Bladed and FAST by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), is a common practice and is widely accepted in both industry and academia because it is not convenient and often infeasible to utilise real-life turbines due to their size and availability. As an example, in industry, wind turbine controllers are applied to and tuned using an aeroelastic wind turbine model before it is applied to the real-life wind turbine [5, 6].