A novel technique for stand-alone hydropower plant

Abstract

Stand-alone hydropower plant is a major energy source in grid isolated zone because they do not require dams to be built. In a stand-alone hydropower plant Voltage and frequency, instability is caused by the load variation. This can cause the alternator to spin very quickly or very slowly, causing the induced voltage and output frequency to rise or fall. Furthermore, if the rate of alternator growth is too high or too low, the load appliances connected to the generator can undergo huge damage. For optimal overall performance of a small hydropower plant, generated voltage and frequency must be within the required range. To overcome these issues, a system is discussed in this paper. The proposed system not only stabilizes stand-alone hydropower plant output through an electronic load control system but is also easy and price-effective. Electronic load controller managed small hydro energy generation that takes into vital parameters, i.e, stabilization of both voltage and frequency despite variable consumer load. The presented technique consists of PID and fuzzy logic control system and also a couple of DC motors interconnected with an H-bridge to control the water valve known as a gate. The proposed control system also consists of several dummy loads to dump the extra generated power to keep the output power constant and to overcome frequency variations. For increased efficiency and life span of the generator, dummy loads used are switched only at zero crossings of a sinusoidal signal. The proposed system is implemented on both Simulink/MATLAB and Proteus. The simulation results prove that the presented technique overcomes the challenges of stand-alone hydropower plants.