Posters

Abstract

During the last years, the environmental agreements have led to a fast increase in the amount of power generation plants, among which wind is one of the most widely used. While onshore wind farms grow at a steady pace, it is expected that offshore assets will grow in the coming years due to the good wind conditions (much stronger and more constant wind comparing to onshore sites) thus increasing the competitiveness of the renewable energy. Regarding offshore industrial trends, nowadays turbines around 10MW are in operation and other in the range of 13-15MW are being under commissioning process. Thus, the limit of 15MW will soon be overstepped. With current technologies and the expected progress in materials and engineering, it is no possible to predict what the limit might be, but it is expected to maintain this fast rate of change, with the aim of producing cost effective solutions, with an increasingly efficient operation, easy maintainability, and improved reliability. Within this scenario Ingeteam is developing a brand-new medium voltage power converter INGECON® WIND FULL CONVERTER MV that will manage power values above 17MW. It will be achieved by means of two parallel conversion lines which will provide redundancy in terms of de-rated operation under a conversion line fault. Based on HV-IGBTs and active neutral-point clamped (ANPC) topology they will maximize the availability and reliability under the strictest conditions (mechanical, electrical, and ambient). They will include the most cutting-edge technologies including predictive control and online diagnosis tools of the key components of the converter. Additionally, they will be subjected to the most restrictive validation processes. The Hardware process will include electrical and mechanical tests according to the strictest standards. FW will be validated using the most advanced techniques of simulation - both Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) and Software-In-the-Loop (SIL) anticipating any issue in early stages.