International Journal of Engineering and Technology

The developments in power electronics technology have led to the developments in the wind energy conversion system (WECS). The output voltage of the WECS depends on the speed of the wind, which is not constant. Hence, a power conversion unit is required to maintain the output voltage of the WECS constant. This paper presents the design of a boost converter and a voltage controller for maintaining the DC-link voltage of the system constant. A new topology of the cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter (CHB MLI) is proposed for the DC/ AC conversion. The proposed topology eliminates the requirement of separate DC sources. The multilevel inverter is controlled by the selective harmonic elimination pulse width modulation (SHE-PWM) technique. The system is simulated in MATLAB/ Simulink for varying wind speeds. The simulated waveforms of the PMSG rotor speed, the PMSG voltage, the boost converter voltage and the CHBMLI voltages are shown and the results obtained are found to be satisfactory.