Experimental, Numerical and Application Analysis of Hydrokinetic Turbine Performance with Fixed Rotating Blades

Abstract

In this study, a hydrokinetic turbine is designed for the high-altitude regions where local electricity network lines are difficult to reach. If there was a stream flow around, electricity production could be possible and necessary because of environmental reasons. The performance of the hydrokinetic turbine was investigated experimentally and numerically. The numerical analyses of the turbine system were performed via MATLAB/Simulink version R2014a. Except power-based performance characteristics, efficiency of the system in terms of installation and necessary investment costs were also investigated. It is calculated that the system to be established on a river with a water flow rate of 30 m3/h will meet the investment cost in approximately 8 years.

Adaptive Takagi–Sugeno Fuzzy Model Predictive Control for Permanent Magnet Synchronous Generator-Based Hydrokinetic Turbine Systems

“…The basic constituents of the tidal energy conversion system (TECS) [8,32] include the blades, a turbine generator, an inverter, and a grid, as shown in Figure 1. The turbine generator largely functions to convert tidal energy into electricity.…”

“…A surface-seated PMSG is widely used in direct-drive hydrokinetic turbine systems [8,17,33,34]. The mathematical model of a PMSG in a direct quadrature (d-q) reference frame, without considering the armature reaction effect and the saliency, is expressed by…”

“…This section focuses on developing the main control task in the MPTC scheme for sensorless PMSG-HTs. First, the torque reference and stator flux reference values based on the MPPT and MTPA Energies 2020, 13, 5296 9 of 18 schemes were estimated from Equation (8) and Equation (10), respectively. In addition, the d-axis and q-axis currents and the electrical generator rotation speed of the sensorless PMSG were used to obtain the predicted state sequence of its predecessor based on our T-S fuzzy model.…”

“…At present, a permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) is widely employed as the hydrokinetic turbine driven device in the hydropower systems, largely due to its capacity for reaching the maximum power tracking operation, the flexible additional control via converters, and the high thrust at low speed, as well as its high reliability and the lower maintenance costs. From the control point of view, various control strategies have been proposed for the PMSG-based renewable energy conversion systems, including fuzzy logic control [8], robust control [9], field-orientated control (FOC) [10,11], discrete torque control (DTC) [12], proportional-integral (PI) control [13][14][15], proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control [16], sliding mode control [17], model reference adaptive control (MRAC) [18,19], self-adaptive global harmony search (SGHS) [20], and instantaneous-maximum efficiency tracking (i-MET) [21]. However, obtaining the maximum hydropower using the control schemes based on traditional feedback controllers often depends on the accuracy of the mathematical model of the hydrokinetic turbine systems, implying that it tends to be difficult to establish an accurate dynamic model of the hydropower generation system that incorporates a PMSG because of the hydropower system, often a complex nonlinear system, and may be prone to instability and oscillatory behavior from uncertainty tidal flow.…”

“…Furthermore, to track the maximum power from the tidal current speed below the rated speed, so as to maximize the electricity generated from the tidal current, capturing the rotor speed, and/or position of the generator, is vital. While this information can be easily obtained by utilizing the speed/position sensor, according to [8], more than 14% of the system failures are directly related to sensor failure, while more than 40% are indirectly related to sensor failure. Moreover, to achieve the real-time speed control of the PMSG, the speed of the generator must be derived as a feedback signal.…”