Compact Integration of Battery Storage System for a Micro Wind Turbine Generator

As wind turbine (WT) power fluctuates due to the intermittent nature of the wind, batteries can help smooth out this variation. Traditionally, multiple conversion stages are used to manage the power flow between the wind source and the storage device. This paper investigates the feasibility of a dual-port inverter (DPI) as single conversion stage to connect a battery and a micro-WT and shows how the DPI can be controlled to ensure that the most power possible is harvested from the wind turbine. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the DPI has the capability to deliver power to the grid with a unity power factor, even under conditions of highly variable speed, while always extracting maximum power from the WT. The simple DPI-based configuration enables smoothing wind power variations with the battery without employing multiple dc-dc and dc-ac conversion stages.