Abstract

Over the past years, the energy demand has been steadily growing and so methods of how to cope with this staggering increase are being researched and utilized. One method of injecting more energy to the grid is renewable energy, which has become in recent years an integral part of any country’s power generation plan. Thus, it is a necessity to enhance renewable energy resources and maximize their grid utilization, so that these resources can step up and reduce the over dependency of global energy production on depleting energy resources.

This thesis focuses on solar power and effective means to enhance its efficiency through the use of different controllers. In this regard, substantial research efforts have been done. However, due to the current market and technological development, more options are made available that are able to boast the efficiency and utilization of renewables in the power mix.

In this thesis, an enhanced maximum power point tracking (MPPT) controller has been designed as part of a Photovoltaic (PV) system to generate maximum power to satisfy load demand. The PV system is designed and simulated using MATLAB (consisting of a solar panel array, MPPT controller, boost converter, and a resistive load). The solar panel chosen for the array is Sun Power SPR- 440NE-WHT-D and the array is designed to produce 150 kW of power. The MPPT controller is designed using three different algorithms and the results are compared to identify each controller’s fortes and drawbacks. The three designed controllers used are based on Perturb and Observe (P&O) algorithm, Incremental Conductance (INC) with an Integral Regulator (IR) and Fuzzy Logic Control (FLC). Each controller was tested under two different scenarios; the first is when the panel array is subjected to constant amount of solar irradiance along with a constant atmospheric temperature and the second scenario has varying solar irradiance and atmospheric temperature. The performance of these controllers is analyzed and compared in terms of the output power efficiency, system dynamic response and finally the oscillations behavior. After analyzing the results, it is shown that Fuzzy Logic Controller design performed better compared to the other controllers as it had in most cases the highest mean power efficiency and fastest response.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Electric power systems--Control; Smart power grids

Publication Date

4-2019

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Electrical Engineering (MS)

Department, Program, or Center

Electrical Engineering (KGCOE)

Advisor

Abdulla Ismail

Advisor/Committee Member

Yousef Al Assaf

Advisor/Committee Member

Mohamed Samaha

Campus

RIT Dubai

Plan Codes

EEEE-MS

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