Final Product Overview
This page includes the final products delivered to the client and used at the Collegiate Wind Competition.
This figure shows the final rectifier board. Included are terminal blocks for easy connections and convenience during the competition, a smoothing capacitor, bleed-off resistors to quickly discharge the capacitor when the system is turned off or the board is disconnected and the IXYS off-the-shelf rectifier.
This figure shows the final boost converter board. Included are terminal blocks for input and output as well as the +5V input to the Arduino, the MOSFET, Schottky diode, capacitor, Arduino Leonardo and a variety of resistors. The resistors were used as a voltage divider to allow the Arduino to read in voltage levels. This was necessary because the system was boosting output voltage to 12V, however, the Arduino inputs have a max voltage of 5V. Therefore, the voltage divider was used to scale down the voltage to be within the bounds of the Arduino for use in the control algorithm (See Below).
This figure shows the final control algorithm. Two PI controllers were used, making the algorithm fairly complex, but not without bugs. Voltages were read in at several points on the board to calculate the currents across the inductor and load. These currents were used to estimate wind and rotor speed. These values yielded the reference variable ωm*, which was used in the algorithm below. The PI controllers and their real-time autotuning were made possible by third-party Arduino libraries. The output duty cycle controlled the switching component of the boost converter.
Collegiate Wind Competition Results
The team competed and tested the overall system on April 20-22, 2017.
The results can be seen here.
During the final day of testing, the Rectifier Board failed due to a fault in trasportation, causing damage to the circuit. New connections were made, but not in time to be tested and receive a Testing score at the competition. Additional testing was completed after the competition, and was successful.
The team was recognized as having the best technical presentation and as having the second best overall technical system before the above mentioned testing failure.