Design methodologies for sizing a battery bank devoted to a stand-alone and electronically passive wind turbine system

In this paper, the authors investigate four original methodologies for sizing a battery bank inside a passive wind turbine system. This device interacts with wind and load cycles, especially for a stand-alone application. Generally, actual wind speed measurements are of long duration which leads to extensive processing time in a global optimization context requiring a wide number of system simulations. The first part of this article outlines two sizing methodologies based on a statistical approach for the sizing of the electrochemical storage device of a stand-alone passive wind turbine system. Two other efficient methodologies based on the synthesis of compact wind speed profiles by means of evolutionary algorithms are described in the second part of this paper. The results are finally discussed with regard to the relevance of the battery bank sizing and in terms of computation cost, this later issue being crucial to an Integrated Optimal Design (IOD) process. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.