Employment of solar photovoltaic-thermoelectric generator-based hybrid system for efficient operation of hybrid nonconventional distribution generator

Solar photovoltaic system (SPV) has gained tremendous popularity among researchers as well as in industrialists. Although SPV is a transparent way of electricity generation; still, it suffers from lower quantum efficiency. During the conversion process, solar insolation received by the SPV array turns the system intensely heated at the back side of the modules giving rise to high temperature. This heat is further utilized by the process of thermoelectric effect for electricity generation by thermoelectric generators (TEGs). The combined photoelectric-thermoelectric effect generates a significant amount of power for the system. This paper portrays on implementation of the aforementioned SPV-TEG system in hybrid nonconventional distribution generator (h-NDG) in order to retrieve enough power from SPV array giving rise to higher active power delivery to the system and lower the reactive power absorbance by the system. The comparative analysis is done under two subsystems such as solar PV-TEG-wind energy system (WES) over solar PV-WES and solar PV-TEG-fuel cell technology (FCT) over SPV-FCT. Several constraints like active power, reactive power, and solar power are studied for every subsystem under healthy and faulty conditions. The entire system is modeled, studied, and validated in the MATLAB-Simulink environment.