Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) is a private university located in&nbsp;Tamil Nadu, India. Founded in 1984, as Vellore Engineering College, the institution offers 20 undergraduate, 34 postgraduate, four integrated and four research programs. It has campuses in Vellore, Amravati, Bhopal and Chennai.

VIT is one of the top ranked private universities in India according to NIRF, THE and QS Rankings.&nbsp;Govt. of India has recognized&nbsp;VIT, Vellore as an&nbsp;Institution of Eminence. This has allowed VIT to take independent quality initiatives and move up in world ranking.

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VIT University

Department of Energy and Power Electronics

Solar photovoltaic-powered water pumping systems are becoming very successful in regions where there is no opportunity for connecting the electric grid. The photovoltaic technology converts solar energy into electrical energy for operating direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC) motor-based water pump. In the case of a solar AC motor water pump, it engages two energy conversion stages (DCâDC and DCâAC) in the power conditioning unit. This usually resulted in increased size, cost, and complexity and decreases the efficiency of the entire system. The existing two-level inverter (DCâAC) stage generates higher harmonics in output voltage and higher electromagnetic interference that deteriorates directly the AC motor performance. Therefore, as a solution to the addressed problems, in this study, an innovative seven-level inverter with five power semiconductor switches for the operation of 0.5 HP single-phase induction motor pump had been investigated. The proposed multilevel inverter has the capability of providing lesser harmonic voltage that reduces filter requirements; along with this, other part components are used lesser when compared to other conventional multilevel inverters. To provide better insight into the work performance of this proposed topology, the simulation is executed in the MATLAB/Simulink environment, and hardware implementation of the same is depicted. From the results, it is observed that the proposed multilevel inverter topology obtained a total power loss of 1.6034 W and efficiency at 98.11%. This quality output voltage acquired from the multilevel inverter had been fed to drive the induction motor water pump; it pumped the water at the desired flow rate accordingly. Â© Copyright Â© 2020 Poompavai and Kowsalya.

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School of Electrical Engineering

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Fulltext

Frontiers in Energy Research

Investigation of Standalone Solar Photovoltaic Water Pumping System With Reduced Switch Multilevel Inverter

The important interest and efforts devoted by industries and academic research institutions to electricity production from renewable and clean energy with the maturity of existed technologies justify the biggest exploitation of wind energy over the recent years. With the reduction in oil prices, renewable energy is way forward for efficient and environment friendly energy generation. Out of all existing available renewable energy, Wind Energy is the front runner owing to its ability of efficient power generation and to produce energy at large scale. Due to the non linear nature of wind energy, Optimization techniques are extremely critical as they are solely responsible for building an effective wind farm. Layout optimization is performed by using soft computing techniques and are extensively studied in the available literature. Therefore, this review paper highlights the significant research works of wind farm modelling using optimization techniques. This work also addresses the new approaches used in wind farm modelling. Further, it also presents a critical evaluation of existing research methodologies used for wind farm layout optimization. Hence, the objective of this work is to benefit scientists and new entrants in the field of modelling and layout optimization of the wind farm. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Renewable Energy Focus

A novel review on optimization techniques used in wind farm modelling

This paper proposes an effective management system for stand-alone solar photovoltaic (PV) using real-time data with Hybrid Energy Storage System (HESS). The abrupt movement of fleeting clouds often gives rise to PV power output fluctuations which in turn affect the power quality and system stability due to scattered solar radiation reception. These variations can limit through a ramp-limit controller and employing a DC link controller to maintain the stable DC link voltage. The battery is used in the system for continuous power application and the sudden variations in charging and discharging of battery power can create stress on the battery. These sudden changes in a battery will be removed by the super-capacitor (SC) unit and achieves a fast DC link voltage regulation. Hence, the high energy and power density devices such as battery and SC units will deliver more stable power into the system. The control scheme is tested in Matlab/Simulink and validated by Real-Time Hardware-in-Loop (HIL) simulator using periodic one-minute data for one year from the solar PV power plant from real-time. © 2020 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Applied Sciences (Switzerland)

Effective management system for solar PV using real-time data with hybrid energy storage system

This paper proposes a new multilevel inverter (MLI) topology that utilizes trinary sequence for the dc sources. It gives maximum output voltage level with minimum dc source and switch count when compared to other sequences, such as symmetric, natural, binary, and quasi-linear. This is due to the fact that the trinary sequence generates of all additive and subtractive combinations of input dc levels in the output voltage waveform. The concept is implemented on a 9-level asymmetric MLI using only four active devices. Multicarrier unipolar pulsewidth modulation technique is adopted to create the switching pulses. Theoretical calculation of total harmonic distortion in both voltage and current waveforms has been performed using asymptotic time domain formula. These values are compared with simulation and experimental values for different modulation indices. Power loss calculation for proposed topology is discussed with appropriate mathematical equations. © 1982-2012 IEEE.

IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics

Design and Implementation of New Multilevel Inverter Topology for Trinary Sequence Using Unipolar Pulsewidth Modulation

Surveys and statistics showing majority of rural areas and remote places in third world countries are far from accessing electricity and facing power shortage. One important reason for this circumstance is power generating plants distant from rural areas. Despite of AC utility grid most of the loads requires power converters to obtain regulated DC. Also power conversions required in DC grids are less when compared with AC grids. Abundant Renewable energy like solar photovoltaic has potential to provide solution for the rural electrification through DC micro grid. This article presents the design, analysis and simulation of photovoltaic based DC micro grid system with low cost DC household which is not connected to utility Grid. The proposed system suited for running approximately 125 watts loads useful for daily routine. The Proposed system utilizes Boost converter as front-end converter to regulate required DC bus voltage for forming DC micro grid. Fly-back converter is used as point of load converters to meet different load specifications. Simulation study of the proposed system is done in PSIM 9.0. To validate the proposed system 236 watts proto type was developed and tested. © 2020 Alpha Publishers. All rights reserved.

Journal of Green Engineering

Design and analysis of solar PV fed DC micro grid for rural electrification

Purpose: This proposed drone is used for surveillance purpose like medical, agriculture and military in the commercial point of view with less cost and size. Design/methodology/approach: During emergency calls out the technology enabled modes to have quick and timely response for the mankind. As human society continues to spend months together locked inside their homes, it leads to the entire change in the human lifestyle. This also demands the society and the government to get adopt with the technological concepts such as drones to handle this pandemic scenario in a more scientific and safe mode. The major constraints in the utility segment is the cost and performance factor of the drones. This paper aims to design a drone flight management system, which can be used to operate single or multiple drone systems in a wireless mode. The major focus of this work is to minimize the cost of drone flying systems so that it can be accessible to a more massive crowd. The technological design behind the drone has been discussed in detail with mathematical equations. Also the control aspect has been presented in this work. For comparative analysis three drone have been designed and their performance have been compared. Findings: The multi drone is designed, modelling is done and implemented in simulation and hardware. Its having less weight and cost compared to existing drone models. Originality/value: 75% original, 25% of the basic clarifications are taken from existing works. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.

International Journal of Intelligent Unmanned Systems

Optimal design, control and implementation of multi-drones for commercial utility

Harvesting maximum power from a partially shaded photovoltaic array is a critical issue that attracts the attention of several researchers. As per the literature, it is found that providing an optimal reconfigured pattern of the shaded photovoltaic array is an optimal solution for this issue. Therefore, in this paper, an innovative fitness function has been considered with the artificial ecosystem-based optimization for an electrical photovoltaic array reconfiguration approach. The proposed approach has been applied for the large scale photovoltaic arrays including 9 ×9,6×20,16×16, and 25 × 25 photovoltaic array with different shade patterns. The new fitness function has been validated via a comparison with the regular used weighted function in literature. The quality of the solutions of the proposed artificial ecosystem-based optimization–reconfiguration approach has been assessed and demonstrated via performing several measures namely fill factor, percentage of power loss, mismatch power loss, and power enhancement in comparison with a total cross-tied, particle swarm optimizer approaches, and harris hawks optimizer. Furthermore, the Wilcoxon signed-rank test has been performed to illustrate the applicability, robustness, and consistency of the proposed algorithm results across several independent runs. The analysis reveals the quality of the innovative fitness function while integrating with the optimization algorithms in comparison to the weighted fitness function in producing higher power values via attaining a more efficient photovoltaic array design. Furthermore, the results confirmed the efficiency of the artificial ecosystem-based optimization–photovoltaic reconfiguration approach in boosting the generated photovoltaic power by a percentage of 28.688%, 7.0197 %, 29.2565%, 8.3811% and 5.3884 % across the considered systems with an uniform dispersion of the shadow on the photovoltaic surface and providing highest consistent in the maximum power values across the independent runs. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Energy Conversion and Management

A novel objective function with artificial ecosystem-based optimization for relieving the mismatching power loss of large-scale photovoltaic array

The development of fault diagnosis of Li-ion batteries used in electric vehicles is vital. In this perspective, the present work conducted a comprehensive study for the evaluation of coupled and interactive influence of charging ratio, number of cycles, and voltage on the discharge capacity of Li-ion batteries to predict the life of battery. The charging-discharging experimental tests on Li-ion batteries have been performed. The data such as charging ratio, number of cycles, voltage, and discharge capacity of Li-ion batteries are measured. Machine learning approach of neural networks is then applied on the obtained data to compute the effects, normal distribution, parametric analysis, and sensitivity analysis of the input parameters on the capacity of battery. It can be noticed that discharge capacity increased with an increase in full voltage. Further, it has been observed from the sensitivity analysis that the full voltage is most relevant parameters to the capacity of the battery. Additionally, scanning electron microscopy/energy dispersive spectroscopy (SEM/EDS) of the electrodes before and after experiments have been performed, to investigate the elemental dissolution due to the charging/discharging cycles. The findings and analysis from the proposed study shall facilitate experts in making decisions on the remaining life and charging capacity of the battery. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

International Journal of Energy Research

Illustration of experimental, machine learning, and characterization methods for study of performance of Li-ion batteries

A unique nonisolated converter using solar source as input is depicted in this paper. The presented design is an amalgamation of SEPIC converter and voltage tripler structure to attain high static gain voltage. The converter operates by solitary switch, and the voltage strain is less. The input current is continuous, and hence, huge filters are not utilized. Henceforth, the proposed converter is suitable for renewable application. The presented converter is associated to the PV source input and DC load source. The hardware sample of the presented converter along with the PV simulator is tested under laboratory. The prototype of a 30-V input source to 400-V source output developed 400 W, and the performance of the designed topology is evaluated. The theoretical and hardware results accomplish that this converter is apt for high-voltage solicitations. © 2019 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Ltd.

International Transactions on Electrical Energy Systems

Implementation of high-gain nonisolated DC-DC converter for PV-fed applications

The prospects of Electric Vehicles (EVs) have gained momentum due to the weakening of fossil fuels and the emergence of global warming issues. Moreover, highly energy-efficient vehicles have grown in stature due to the rapid progress made by power electronic equipment. It is a fact that the transportation sector consumes a sizable chunk of energy throughout the world. EVs are the solution for this problem as they reduce the radiation of greenhouse gases. Since one third of the EV cost is dependent on its battery, the batteries and the pricing structure have undergone several experiments. The causes and the availability of the energy sources, alternative energy sources, contemporary control methods for formulating policies of energy management, configurations of converting DC-DC in EV applications and the methods of charging EV in a smart environment are exhaustively reviewed in the present study. The study evaluates the challenges and benefits of implementing electric vehicle technology. The utility grid encompasses several alternative energy resources due to the speedy development of EV. Thus, managing and meeting the increasing demand for alternative energy resources could be achieved by using smart grid control. © 2020 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.. All rights reserved.