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Concept
Doubly fed electric machine
Summary
Doubly fed electric machines, also slip-ring generators, are electric motors or electric generators, where both the field magnet windings and armature windings are separately connected to equipment outside the machine.
By feeding adjustable frequency AC power to the field windings, the magnetic field can be made to rotate, allowing variation in motor or generator speed. This is useful, for instance, for generators used in wind turbines. DFIG-based wind turbines, because of their flexibility and ability to control active and reactive power, are almost the most interesting wind turbine technology.
Doubly fed electrical generators are similar to AC electrical generators, but have additional features which allow them to run at speeds slightly above or below their natural synchronous speed. This is useful for large variable speed wind turbines, because wind speed can change suddenly. When a gust of wind hits a wind turbine, the blades try to speed up, but a synchronous generator is locked to the speed of the power grid and cannot speed up. So large forces are developed in the hub, gearbox, and generator as the power grid pushes back. This causes wear and damage to the mechanism. If the turbine is allowed to speed up immediately when hit by a wind gust, the stresses are lower with the power from the wind gust still being converted to useful electricity.
One approach to allowing wind turbine speed to vary is to accept whatever frequency the generator produces, convert it to DC, and then convert it to AC at the desired output frequency using an inverter. This is common for small house and farm wind turbines. But the inverters required for megawatt-scale wind turbines are large and expensive.
Doubly fed generators are another solution to this problem. Instead of the usual field winding fed with DC, and an armature winding where the generated electricity comes out, there are two three-phase windings, one stationary and one rotating, both separately connected to equipment outside the generator. Thus, the term doubly fed is used for this kind of machines.
Official source
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