Variable speed micro-hydro power plant: modelling, loss analysis, and experiment validation
Résumé
energy section. This paper focuses on modelling, lossesanalysis, and experimental validation of the micro-hydro powergeneration system (MHPGS). An efficient modelling approachfor micro-hydraulic turbines has been a significant issue forthe control parameter tuning and experiment validation, firstly,a practical ’hill charts’ based 3-D model is generated, whichprovides a general philosophy on obtaining the mathematicalmodel for different types of micro-hydraulic turbines. Whatis more, global losses of both variable speed and fixed speedoperations are analysed, and then verified in a power hardwarein-the-loop (PHIL) benchmark. Finally, experiments results haveproved that the 3-D model based maximum power point tracking(MPPT) performs efficiently, and the variable speed operationgains higher global efficiency compared with the fixed speed case,especially when the valve opening ratio is far from the optimisedoperation point.