Vertical Axis Wind Turbine Improvement using DC-DC Boost Converter

Vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) can be operated in any direction of wind speed, but it has low rotation. To improve the performance of VAWT in which low rotation, this paper presents a simple control strategy of VAWT using a DC-DC boost converter to tap constant voltage in a standalone application. The main objective of this research is to maintain a constant output voltage of converter despite variation input voltage affected by variable wind speed. A simple proportional-integral (PI) controller has been used for a DC-DC boost converter and tested in MATLAB-Simulink environment, with the closed-loop system of the converter maintain constant output voltage although the wind speed is kept changing. The PI controller obtains the feedback from the output voltage of the boost converter to produce the correct pulse width modulation (PWM) duty cycle and trigger the metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) following the reference voltage of the turbine. This system has suppressed the value of overshoot and increased the efficiency of wind turbines as 34 %.