Optimal Fractional-Order PI Control Design for a Variable Speed PMSG-Based Wind Turbine

This paper focusses on the design of optimal control strategies for a variable-speed wind energy system based on Permanent Magnet Synchronous Generator (PMSG). The fractional order PI controller, denoted PIλ, is an extension of the classical PI controller, which provides greater flexibility, better performance and robustness, however the tuning of the controller parameters is challenging. In this work, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) provide approximate solutions to various problems and form a good optimization. In our system, they are used to have the PI regulator parameters and tune the parameters of the proposed controllers. The proposed controllers have been applied as maximum power point (MPPT) controllers for the wind turbine and to regulate the PMGS currents under variable weather conditions and. The results show that, among all these controllers, the fractional order PI controller optimized by the PSO leads to better performance in terms of the transient response characteristics such overshoot, rise time and settling time.