Wind turbine system control
AssigneeGeneral Electric Company
InventorsGary Moore, Mark Edward Cardinal
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Wind turbine generator wind farm systems to collect data for use for wind farm control. A combination master-slave supervisory command and data acquisition (SCADA) architecture together with distributed databases local to the data producing device within a wind farm provide functionality for real-time monitoring and control as well as secondary data processing and/or remote user access. The architecture facilitates approximately real-time monitoring and control of devices in the wind farm both locally and remotely while also facilitating reliable archiving of operational data of individual wind turbines as well as totalized wind farm data.
Claims24
A supervisory command and data acquisition (SCADA) system to manage a wind farm comprising:
- a plurality of turbine communication servers (TCSs) within wind turbines of the wind farm to collect data from the turbines and to store a first subset of the data locally and to transmit the first subset of data according to non-real-time intervals and to transmit a second subset of data over a wind farm network to provide approximately real-time data, wherein the second subset of data is stored until successfully transferred;
- and
- a server coupled to communicate with the plurality of TCSs to provide signals to control the wind turbines, the server being further to store data received from the plurality of TCSs and to perform database management on the received data.
A system for managing a wind farm having a plurality of wind turbines comprising:
- a Supervisory Command and Data Acquisition (SCADA) element at each wind turbine to collect data from the respective wind turbine and to store a first subset of the data locally and to transmit the first subset of data according to non-real-time intervals and to transmit a second subset of data over a wind farm network to provide approximately real-time data, wherein the second subset of data is stored until successfully transferred;
- a SCADA element at each of one or more meteorological sites to collect meteorological data;
- a SCADA element at each of one or more substations electrically connected with the plurality of wind turbines;
- and
- a server coupled to communicate with the wind turbine, meteorological, and substation SCADA elements via the wind farm network to receive and to store data received from the elements at predetermined intervals and to perform database management on the received data, the server further to gather and maintain current and historical data as to inputs, operating conditions, and outputs of the plurality of wind turbines.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.