Hybrid Communication Network Architectures for Monitoring Large-Scale Wind Turbine

Nowadays, a rapid development in wind power technologies is occurring compared with other renewable energies. This advance in technology has facilitated a new generation of wind turbines with larger capacity and higher efficiency. As the height of the turbines and the distance between turbines increases, the monitoring and control of this new generation wind turbines presents new challenges. This paper presents the architectural design, simulation, and evaluation of hybrid communication networks for a large-scale wind turbine (WT). The communication network of WT is designed based on logical node (LN) concepts of the IEC 61400-25 standard. The proposed hybrid network architectures are modeled and evaluated by OPNET. We also investigate network performance using three different technologies: Ethernet-based, WiFi-based, and ZigBee-based. Our network model is validated by analyzing the simulation results. This work contributes to the design of a reliable communication network for monitoring and controlling a wind power farms (WPF).