DeepWind is a vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) concept, with the turbine rotor mounted on a floating spar buoy with the generator at the bottom up to 300 m below the sea. To control the starting, variable speed and overspeed limitation operation of the VAWT, the only method available is to control the torque and speed of the generator. A four quadrant, three level, neutral point clamped inverter configuration is proposed and the design of this discussed. Various operational features are tested on a small scale laboratory version. Sample test results are given. The challenges of the DeepWind marine application are presented and discussed and some solutions are proposed.

Topics
Wind turbines, Power electronics, Educational assessment
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