Performance investigations of solar photovoltaic water pumping system using centrifugal deep well pump

Abstract

Photovoltaic technology is an effective, reliable and rapidly developing technology to convert solar energy into electrical energy. In the recent years, the need and demand of solar photovoltaic water pumping system has been increased as a stand-alone water pumping system to pump water in remote, desolate and mountainous region for end use of livestock watering and rural/urban water supply system. For a required pumping head, photovoltaic array configuration and its size (peak power rating, Wp) affect the flow rate of pumped water, economy and performance of solar photovoltaic water pumping system. The recent work is aimed to study performance of a directly coupled solar photovoltaic water pumping system at different pumping heads (2 bar, 3 bar, 4 bar, and 5 bar) and different photovoltaic array configurations (3S?2P, 4S?2P, 5S?2P, 6S, 7S, and 8S) for the real meteorological conditions of the Vidarbha region, central India (Nagpur). A comparative study has been done to investigate the head effect on the optimum photovoltaic array configuration, pump and pumping system total efficiency by performing experiment on the centrifugal deep well pump (SQF 5A-7), with 6-10 photovoltaic modules (200 W each) with various configurations and different heads. It is concluded that the 4S?2P and 5S?2P configurations are most optimized array to provide optimum energy at all pumping heads.