Design of a test bench for a small wind turbine emulator

In this work, the authors present a small-scale wind turbine emulator that reproduces the steady-state performances of a wind turbine at various wind conditions. The proposed emulator is based on a three-phase induction machine powered by a variable-speed drive. The model of the emulated wind turbine comes from the PropID program, which permits an accurate modeling of its aerodynamic characteristics. In this study, the model of the Whisper100 wind turbine from Southwest Windpower is chosen for the test validation. The performances of the emulated Whisper100 wind turbine are examined by an experimental test bench under variable operating conditions. The theoretical results are compared with those obtained experimentally.