Applications of Power Electronics for Renewable Energy
Abstract
The use of renewable energy sources is growing in popularity despite the world’s present dependence on fossil fuel energy. This growth is driven in part by technological improvements. One form of renewable energy, hydro power, in recent decades has found a role in small scale systems for rural villages, especially in the developing world. For such microhydro systems, it is possible to control the loading on the generator by electronic means. However, the switching nature of the power electronics introduces undesired harmonics and causes stress in the generator. Hence, a new electronic load controller topology is proposed to reduce the level of the injected harmonic content in the generator stator windings. Another issue in microhydro systems is the lack of effective generator utilization where the generator is off for much of the day or power is wasted in a dump load. Hence a novel controller is proposed, the distributed electronic load controller, installed in each household to reduce the wasted energy in the powerhouse. In a different context, solar photovoltaic power usually requires an inverter to produce AC electrical power. However, there are several challenges in the design of inverter control for photovoltaic and other applications. Modern space vector control methods while providing more flexibility as compared to carrier based methods, have become complex in their implementation. A computationally efficient, universal fast Space Vector Modulation (SVM) algorithm is proposed for the multilevel inverter. The multilevel inverter topology is becoming increasingly popular for many industry applications, but has great appeal in photovoltaic systems since multiple DC sources can be taken advantage of. However, one drawback of multilevel inverter topologies is the large number of switching devices. This increases the probability of failure and decreases system reliability. The high execution speed and simplicity of the proposed fast SVM method is refined and extended in the case of fault tolerant systems and in the case of imbalanced input voltage and power. Simulation and experimental verifications indicate that the proposed electronic load control concepts and SVM concepts are valuable for further investigations.
Description
Keywords
Engineering--Electronics and Electrical
Citation
Mohamadiniaye Roodsari, B. (2015). Applications of Power Electronics for Renewable Energy (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/24972