A Full-Bridge Partial-Power Processing Converter Applied to Small Wind Turbines Systems

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.