Fractional order PI controller based on hill climbing technique for improving MPPT of the BDF-RG driven by wind turbine

This paper presents a novel maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique using the hill climbing method to optimize the power extracted from a wind turbine coupled to a brushless doubly fed (BDF) reluctance generator (RG). The reference speed step size of the hill climbing is evaluated using a fractional order proportional plus integral controller. The BDF-RG is proposed for the wind power station due to the high reliability of its brushless design and the absence of rotor losses. Moreover, the ability to utilize a fractionally rated back to back inverter reduces the overall system cost. A comparison study is carried out, through simulation program, between a hill climbing with MPPT system utilizing the fractional order proportional plus integral controller and the conventional PI controller. The wind turbine coupled to the BDF-RG controlled by fractional order proportional plus integral technique is simulated using the Matlab/Simulink environment. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness and validity of using both of the fractional order proportional plus integral and the PI controllers for extracted power optimization of BDF-RG wind turbine power station.