Ingeteam, the global specialist in wind energy drivetrain technology, announces that its firmware development methodology has been shown to significantly reduce the critical on-site validation and certification phase thanks to its robust qualification process. This speeds up the time to market and commercial production capacity of new wind farm developments whilst ensuring the highest level of reliability in the field.
Securing the transmission capacity and interconnectivity of new wind turbines to the grid is a crucial moment during the installation of any new wind farm. This critical phase often involves up to six months of field tests to ensure that all the elements are working properly before the wind farm achieves full certification. At the heart of this process is the power converter connecting each turbine to the transmission network. The firmware program within the converter controls and ensures the correct electrical behavior and safe operation of the electrical grid, which is why its behavior must be rigorously tried and tested prior to installation.
Ingeteam’s firmware development and validation process uses advanced simulation models to ensure their operation is reliable and deterministic. Specially adapted to meet each customer’s precise requirements, the firmware development procedure involves an iterative qualification process. Using Software-in-the-Loop (SiL) and Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) validation procedures, any issues found during the validation stage are quicky fed back into the development stage to be corrected.
The SiL models allow detailed debugging down to individual breakpoints on the source code, while the HiL simulations, using real-time execution, provide full software and hardware controller integration testing. The clear advantage of this step being that the firmware tested is exactly the same as the firmware released to production.
Eduardo Sanz, Technical Services Product Manager, R&D Power Converters, explained; “The constant evolution of grid codes and the unique grid conditions of each wind farm mean that firmware is increasingly complex. Any unexpected behavior can lead to serious issues affecting production availability, grid code compliance and even damage to turbine components. Our detailed step-by-step testing and validation methodology ensures that the controller and the production code are fully tested during the development stages. This minimizes the on-site validation and certification phase, reduces time to market and overall installation costs, ensuring peace of mind!”.
Ingeteam is an international technological Group specialized in electric power conversion. Its state of the art developments in power and control electronics (inverters, frequency converters, controllers and protections), rotative electric machines (Indar motors, generators and submersible motor & pumps sets), systems (electromechanical engineering and automation projects), and services (operation & maintenance services), enable it to provide the best solutions in different sectors, namely: wind, solar PV, hydro and fossil fuel power generation; metal and mineral processing; mining; marine; rail traction; waters; e-vehicle charging and power grid automation, always achieving sustainable and efficient energy generation, transmission, distribution and consumption.
The company operates throughout the world, and is permanently based in 24 countries, with a headcount of 4,000. R&D is the backbone of its business activity, in which 5% of its turnover is annually invested.
