A Full-Bridge Partial-Power Processing Converter Applied to Small Wind Turbines Systems
Anderson J. Balbino, Moisés Carlos Tanca Villanueva, Telles Brunelli Lazzarin
Abstract
In order to process the energy generated by small wind turbines (SWT) in isolated systems or dc microgrids, two-stage configurations employing a rectifier and dc-dc converter have been suitable due to the power decoupling between the rectifier and dc-dc converter, adding facility to realize the maximum power point tracking regarding single-stage solutions. However, the losses of the system can be increased due to the additional dc-dc converter. To reduce this effect, partial-power converters (PPC) can be used, in which only a part of the power generated by the SWT system is processed by the converter. In this context, this article describes a theoretical and experimental study on a Full-Bridge dc-dc converter based on the partial-power processing (PPP) concept applied to SWT systems. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed structure, experimental results are presented for a 1.5 kW SWT, in which the Full-Bridge PPC processed only 70% of the generated power.