Protection to Wind Power System with DFIG Using
Crowbar Protection System
Engr. Nadeem Ahmed Awan
Electrical Engineering Department
HITEC Uiversity
Taxila, Pakistan
nadeemawan176@gmail.com
Abstract- In Doubly Feed Induction Generator are broadly
used in wind energy because of its unique characteristics as
stator is directly connected to grid and rotor winding are
connected through control mechanism of converters. In
fault conditions only rotor or stator voltages and current are
disturbed. In my purposed design crowbar switch is used to
protect rotor. There are different types of crowbar used
today like Ignitron, Sparkgaps and thyratrons. Resistance of
Crowbar is designed as it’s the main part of our control
system. Control Design of crowbar consist of 3 phase
currents Ira, Irb, Irc are rotor phase currents and all these are
compared with some threshold value which could be 1.5 time
of normal current or more and it is taken as reference point
of comparator so that if any value more than Imax will rise
comparator will give as 1 at output otherwise it will forward
0 and it will remain OFF. For time less than 0.4 seconds will
be adjustable and protection system will not if fault time
exceeds from lockout time the comparator will forward as 1.
Crowbar is represented as RS Flip Flop which is logical
switch clock generation circuit is required to operate the RS
Flip Flop.
I. INTRODUCTION
In Energy producing Industries world’s greatest challenge is
the pollution and renewable energy resources like solar and
wind power systems are reducing the cost of producing the
energy and pollution as well .Wind energy as compare with
other sources of energy is most reliable and efficient source
because of producing power with small environment impact
[1].producing the energy from wind the speed of active wind
power is 20-50 m/s. wind carries power in the form of Kinetic
Energy (K.E) so to convert this energy to electrical energy as
system is needed. The induction generator with fixed speed
and varying speed can be assemble for the conversion but
every type of induction generator has its own advantages Most
of power systems are
producing the wind energy to electrical energy by means of
DFIG doubly fed induction generator due to its small size as
compare with other types .It’s about 25-30% size of
convertors [2].Similar cause to choose DFIG on other types of
Induction generator is that it provides constant level of voltage
as well as frequency while speed of rotor varies [3]. In DFIG
70 % power is received from stator to grid as rotor connected
directly with grid and 30 % power is obtained through rotor.
Rotor control circuit consist of two types Rotor side
convertors RSC and Grid side converters GRC are separated
by dc link capacitor and DC link capacitor is placed by
calculating the optimum value of DC Link capacitor. Energy
produced from wind turbine is transmitted to grid but in order
to meet criteria the both energy producers and national grid
must agree on different special parameters called grid code
[4]. Grid codes are FRT, LVRT, Voltage, Frequency and
power factor ratio. DFIG as compare with FRT and IG are
preferred due to its small size of converters as most of the
power is transmitted directly without processing through
control mechanism. Another factor of preferring DFIG over
other types of generator is its sensitivity during fault
condition.
DFIG is more sensitive towards fault and it will disconnect
during fault if grid code criteria will not meet and remain
offline until fault is completely finished. In the fault condition
there are so many possible techniques like crowbar. There are
different types of crowbar used today like Ignitron, Sparkgaps
and thyratrons etc [5]. Energy storage banks systems[ESS]
are also used which will deliver the energy until fault is
reduced these types of system maintain the power generation
but cost of storing energy also increased as these types of
systems need batteries to store the energy and also control
mechanism is needed. In this paper I try to overcome and
control rotor current I_r if I_r but it does not have any control
over voltage and stator current I_s as it is designed to protect
the rotor current only. If rotor current will increase the
probability of errors for rotor current may produced and due to
increase in rotor current speed of rotor will also increased
from rated speed and due to which the rotor winding may
damage as these are designed on some specific rating if Ir will
be more than rated current there should be some threshold that
provide the resistance to control the Ir and if it will be below
the threshold it will be turn of and provide bypass and
resistance will be turn off.
Rating of crowbar is very important as its main part of my
design if any other resistance less or greater will used it may
cause degraded performance of voltage and frequency and
may cause unbeneficial objectives as we required to subtract
the over current from reference rated current of rotor Ir. So we
must optimize this resistance in order to achieve better
performance.
II. MODELING OF DFIG BASED GENARATOR
Let suppose the rotor power is P rot and stator power is Pstat then
relationship of both power is defined by the following formula

Generated power will be calculated by

Slip will be calculated by the following formula

Fig.1.DFIG Generator with Prtotected Crowbar

I have designed the protection of rotor through resistance <

called crowbar resistance Rc as shown in Fig.1 here wind
turbine of 5Mw is considered and its providing the power to
grid through 2 split lines of 50 KM distance as if any fault in
one line will observed the power flow will be from the 2 nd path
of transmission line. Threshold for Ir will be less then Ir rated Pm>
current as it could provide the protection before reaching to In three phases it’s very difficult to calculate all three phase
rated current in order to avoid the losses. If any phase current currents and voltage so we approximate our circuits to two
will be more than threshold the logical circuit will turn ONN phases by means of Park Transformation Equations.
the crowbar switch and provide the resistance to rotor current.
At the start it is possible that wind turbines rotor current will
exceed from threshold value but it should not turn onn the Stator voltage equations
crowbar it should remain deactivate during initial t=0.4
seconds but after the t=0.4 seconds any fault may occur like
transients and lightening due to which current could exceeds
form threshold point but it may probable that only one phase
current or two could rise from specific threshold so every
phase current should be under control of rotor crowbar
resistance for that purpose we need to establish a resistance
path to every phase current separately and OR all these
comparative outputs of threshold with each other so any phase
abnormal conditions could be monitor and also time of fault is
monitored through mono chromatic switch. Output of both
will AND to get required out but switch will be RS logical
Flip Flop operated only in during the fault and remain Offline
for normal conditions.
Stator flux equations
To prove the above theory I implemented the circuit of
crowbar in Matlab’s tool Simulink and performed the
simulation for obtaining the results. I checked the voltage and
current of stator and rotor without crowbar circuit and with
crowbar circuit and also DC link voltage and Power curves. I
performed simulation using DFIG based wind turbine.

I compared the results and proved my theory with the help of

these results I presented in section II, The modeling of DFIG Rotor voltage Equations
is presented, Crowbar modeled in section III, results are
presented in Section IV and Section V is used to describe the
theme of paper.
Rotor flux equations
Stator flux equations

Rotor voltage equations

Stator Transformation Matrix

Rotor flux equations

Rotor Transformation Matrix

III. CROWBAR OPTIMIZING

DFIG protection performance depends on crowbar and its very
essential to select an optimum value for crowbar so for
optimum value we have to check the criteria by varying the
According to park transfer rule inverse of park transfer matrix crowbar resistance value and checking the performance of
will be equal to park transfer matrix transpose speed, frequency and active power curves during fault with
So and without crow bar resistance .Crowbar value is selected
from the Isc means short circuit current rating first we have to
Similarly evaluate the short circuit current and perform then collect the
optimum value of crow bar .

So

Fig.2 Designed Protection Using Crowbar Resistance Circuit

The Restance circuit as shown if fig.2 is called as passive

Dq equations for rotor and stator voltage and current protected crowbar based circuit [6].
are as follow
Formula for short circuit current is as below

Here Is-c short circuit current and RT is calculated by
Rotor voltage is calculated by the following formula
From this formula we could calculate the Rcrb means
Resistance of crowbar from below given formula
If we will approximate the results the optimized crowbar will
be as under [6]:-
Table 1. Calculation of I and V for 5 MW Grid
This ratio shows that when resistance of crowbar is 20 times
of rated rotor resistance the current of rotor will be decreased
from nominal value of 4.08 pu to 3.34 pu.
IV RESULTS
With and without crow bar the results are prepared on the
behalf of simulation performed for 5 MW wind power systems
and the from given below results its very clear that without
crowbar rotor current exceeds from threshold value but with
crowbar it does not exceeds from specified value.
1. Without any Fault.
When there is no fault is applied rotor current and
voltage and all factors shown below remain same as
far as there is no disturbance recorded except initial
period of DFIG.
Fig.3(a).Rotor V without Crowbar and without fault.
Fig.3(b).Rotor I without Crowbar and without fault.
Fig.3(c).Stator V without Crowbar and without fault.
Fig.3 (d).Stator I without Crowbar and without fault.
 Fig.3 (e).Active Power Without any fault Fig.4(d).Stator current without Crowbar and with fault

Fig.3 (f).Reactive Power Without any fault Fig.4(e).Active Power Without any fault

Fig.4(f).Reactive Power Without any fault

Fig.3 (g).DC Link Voltage without any fault

2. DFIG Simulation with 3 phase fault .

When there is fault is applied rotor current and

voltage and all factors shown below remain
disturbed as far as there is no protection is used Fig.4(g).DC link Voltage without any fault
with DFIG.
3. DFIG Simulation with crowbar circuit

When there is no fault is applied and crowbar is used

with DFIG for only protecting the rotor current its
very clear that only rotor current is controlled but all
other does not effected by this designed circuit so
there is no control on stator voltage and current of
DFIG.
Fig.4(a).Rotor voltage without Crowbar and with fault

Fig.5(a).Rotor voltage with Crowbar and with fault

Fig.4(b).Rotor current without Crowbar and with fault

Fig.5(b).Rotor current with Crowbar and with fault

Fig.4(c).Stator voltage without Crowbar and with fault

Fig.5(c).Stator Voltage with Crowbar and with fault

 [4] Mansour Mohseni, Syed M. Islam,”Review of
international grid codes for wind power integration:
Diversity, technology and a case for global standard”,
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Volume 16,
Issue 6,2012,Pages 3876-3890.
Fig.5(d).Stator current with Crowbar and with fault [5] J. -. Jensen and W. Merz, "Light triggered thyristor
crowbar for klystron protection application," Proceedings
of the 2003 Particle Accelerator Conference, Portland,
OR, 2003, pp. 749-751 Vol.2.
doi: 10.1109/PAC.2003.1289465

[6] Beniuga, Razvan & Istrate, Marcel & Oana, Beniuga "
Fig.5(e).Active Power With 3 Phase fault and crowbar Crowbar protection impact on wind farm behaviour
during grid disturbance," 10.1109/MPS.2017.7974390 ,
2017.

Fig.5(f).Reactive Power With 3 Phase fault and crowbar

V CONCLUSION
On the basis of results it is concluded that wind energy
systems with DFIG’s are more prefer able as compare with the
other types because of its unique characteristics and
performance but if DFIGs are used this type generator must
use crowbar protection scheme or any other scheme for both
rotor and stator in order to protect the winding of rotor we can
implement the crowbar protections but for start we could use
series crowbar technique for better result and it’s very clear
from my Matlab’s simulation that when a crowbar resistance
is used the rotor current does not exceeds from threshold point
but it also shown here that no control of voltage and DC link is
established here in my purposed design but for better
achievements we can modify my purposed design by using
separate protection of stator and rotor voltage and current.

References

[1] R. Cardenas, R. Pena, S. Alepuz and G. Asher, "Overview

of Control Systems for the Operation of DFIGs in Wind
Energy Applications," in IEEE Transactions on Industrial
Electronics, vol. 60, no. 7, pp. 2776-2798, July 2013.

[2] A. Noubrik, L. Chrifi-Alaoui, P. Bussy and A. Benchaib,

"Analysis and simulation of a 1.5 MVA doubly fed wind-
power in MATLAB SimPowerSystems using crowbar
during power systems disturbances," 2011 International
Conference on Communications, Computing and Control
Applications (CCCA), Hammamet, 2011, pp. 1-6.

[3] S. Swain and P. K. Ray, "Fault ridethrough and power

quality improvement of Doubly-Fed Induction Generator
based wind turbine system during grid fault with Novel
Active Crowbar Protection design," 2016 IEEE Region 10
Conference (TENCON), Singapore, 2016, pp. 2628-2633.