Ground Testing of the World's First MW-Class Direct Drive Superconducting Wind Turbine Generator

The EU-funded EcoSwing project addresses the world's first full-scale direct-drive (DD) high temperature superconducting (HTS) wind turbine generator. Before installing the generator on a commercial wind turbine, the generator was tested on the ground at the Dynamic Nacelle Testing Laboratory (DyNaLab) in Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy Systems (IWES), serving as an experimental validation of the generator design. This paper is centered on the ground testing of the EcoSwing HTS generator, which includes corresponding tests for validating the generator's cryogenic design and electromagnetic performance. Despite one HTS coil with a defect limiting the operating current significantly, partial power production up to 1 MW at 14.5 rpm was reached. The critical auxiliary systems, i.e., vacuum system and rotary helium coupling, behaved as expected or even better than anticipated. The work reported in the paper successfully validates the generator design, and also provides firsthand information prior to installing and testing the HTS generator on the wind turbine.