I wonder if its possible to use a victron smart solar mppt as controller for a wind turbine.
I would rectify the output from the turbine and DC would be supplied to the controller. I´m just not sure how the mppt algorithm will handle the voltage variations from the wind turbine… Possibly not as predictable as a solar panel.
Has anyone tested this?
cheers,
Fred
It does not work reliably. If the MPPT reduces the load on the windturbine, for example because the battery is full, then the turbine will spin up. The less power the MPPT demands from it the higher it will spin up, possibly to destruction.
Because of this, windturbine controllers use a dummy load, instead of freewheeling the excess power gets burned off.
Apart from all the other issues that small windturbines have and face
Makes sense.
And do you think putting a relay controlled by the mppt relay port to connect a dummy load to the line coming from the turbine when the controller enters float mode could work?
Not really, since theres no setpoint that lets you define PV voltage as the trigger for the load output. And battery voltage does not really reflect if the windturbine is running too fast.
I feel like even triggering on windturbine output voltage is not reliable, better would be measuring RPM or using the AC output of the generator to determine its speed.
Certainly not impossible, i guess an arduino with some additional components could do that, but i think its not worth the trouble
It doesn’t really make sence to use (any) MPPT-Approach for Wind turbines.
Maximum Power Point Tracking generally puts a variety of “load-szenarios” on the panels and just checks, which is running stable and delivers most power. For Solar, that is fine, as the panels recover from an unideal point in no time.
If you however apply a to high load to a windturbine, it will be physically slowed down, eventually into a full stop. Then, recovering up to the desired production RPM would take way to much time to make “mppt’ing” an useful approach.
So, Inverters for Wind turbines generally use a pre-configurable Voltage/Current curve, so that the inverter exactly knows: When the turbine is at 70V, I can draw 25A to keep it exactly at it’s ideal rpm.
What about a pwm controller?
Same issue with freewheeling, but now also with voltage differences. Clamping a 50V windturbine output down to a 12V battery will slow the windturbine way down.
Dognose speaking about windturbine inverters made me think about a VFD with regenerative braking. But that would be another thing that has more down- than upsides. One of the upsides would be that you could always have wind by driving the windturbine from the VFD 
The issue with the varying speed and consequent influence on the mppt algorithm I agree, I know outback charge controllers can be set to solar or wind…
disconnecting the power from the rectifier and connecting it to a load can be done with 2 relays or ssr´s why not?
If the mppt can be set to open or close a relay when it enters float mode, I suppose we could use it to trigger two relays simultaneously, one that would cut the power from the rectifier and another one to connect the power to the load.
Hi,
You didn’t mention the make or model of your wind turbine.
With all turbines, it’s always best to buy the controller associated with the turbine. It’s then a relatively easy process to integrate it with any Victron system. Please see the post below; it may be of some help.
Compatibility with Wind Generator Charge Controllers - DIY - Victron Community
Good luck, Dave.
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