Post-doc Debranjan Mukherjee with Advisor Dr. Arijit Banerjee

Offshore wind energy conversion systems are getting increased attention due to high and steady wind potential and minimum environmental effects. Our group has proposed an integrated generator-rectifier architecture. The generator considered has multiple three-phase ac ports. Most of these ports are connected to diode-bridge rectifiers while one is connected to a three-phase active rectifier. These rectifier outputs are serially stacked to form the dc-grid. The most attractive feature of this integrated rectifier is that the majority of the power is processed by reliable, efficient, and inexpensive diodes operating at the generator frequency. This minimizes the total switch volt-ampere requirements and improves reliability, efficiency, and power density. More details about the architecture can be found here:

  1. T. Huynh, P. J. Wang and A. Banerjee, “An Integrated Permanent-Magnet-Synchronous Generator–Rectifier Architecture for Limited-Speed-Range Applications,” in IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, vol. 35, no. 5, pp. 4767-4779, May 2020.

The effectiveness of the architecture has already been verified using a sub-kW laboratory prototype. Now, we have designed and built a 200kW generator and working on to validate the performance of the proposed architecture. The generator on the test bed is shown in figure below. This research is funded by ARPA-E.

Figure 1. The 200kW generator designed by the UIUC team.