Scalable Hydrokinetics power generation Network for Rural Electrification

Among the renewable resources such as wind, biomass, hydel and solar, hydrokinetics is a largely untapped renewable resource that has good potential for small and medium scale power generation. This work proposes a novel approach for scalable and modular hydrokinetics power generation from slow moving water bodies such as irrigation canals, by integration of multiple turbines with voltage droop control at point of interaction (POI). These units are anticipated to be especially useful in rural communities in powering applications for optimal utilization of water through drip-irrigation system. Each power generation unit (PGU) of the proposed architecture consists of a turbine-generator system with a power processing unit (PPU) that both extracts the maximum power available at any time and connects the output of the module to the POI. POI, in our case, is a dc link supported by battery storage system and an elastic load to ensure optimum utilization of all available power. PPU is proposed to consist of a MPPT ac-dc rectifier feeding power to a dc link and a converter for elastic load management. The simulation of the full integrated system is carried out in PowerSim and implementation results compared through a two-unit laboratory setup for parallel operation of multiple PGUs in tandem. The results show a good correlation between the anticipated results and measured values.