This research addresses the problem of temperature fluctuations affecting the efficiency of solar panels. A cooling system has been developed using a Peltier and a combination of air- and water-cooling methods. The air-cooling system involves placing a Peltier coated with a heatsink under the solar panel, while the water-cooling system uses pumped water on the panel's surface. The study aims to design a solar panel cooling system to reduce temperature and power losses and compare its output to standard solar panels. The system includes a Peltier, DC fan, and heatsink. Results indicate that the air-cooling system reduced temperature losses on the bottom milk of solar panels by 14.5%. However, the surface of solar panels showed no reduction in temperature losses. Additionally, solar panels with cooling systems were able to reduce power losses by 4% compared to standard solar panels. This research suggests that the use of an air-cooling system utilizing Peltier as the cooling medium could be a potential solution to reduce temperature losses and power losses on solar panels.
The utilization of renewable energy sources is being pushed by both greater environmental consciousness and expanding demand. Recently, solar photovoltaic technology has found increased use for a broader range of applications. This may be ascribed to solar energy's extensive availability as well as its long-term viability and low cost. According to the global photovoltaic (PV) industry, 594 gigawatts (GW) of PV capacity were installed in 2019, with the objective of replacing conventional source-based generating facilities. The major problem in PV production, however, is identifying the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) systems that are currently in use to compute peak output. For 1240 W PV power plants, this article compares perturb & observe MPPT approaches with incremental conductance MPPT techniques. The MATLAB Simulink program was utilized to conduct the study, which was based on many factors such as voltage, current, and output power under various weather conditions. When these MPPT algorithms are applied to solar trackers, the efficiency, reaction time, and steady-state oscillations all improve.
To ensure enhanced reliability and availability of electricity to consumers, grid-connected photovoltaic systems need to improve their power quality, this paper uses a three-phase five levels cascaded H-bridge inverter in grid-connected mode to improve the flexibility and efficiency of the photovoltaic system. Each photovoltaic (PV) array in the proposed system has a maximum power point tracker (MPPT) to extract the PV array maximum power point for a particular irradiance and temperature and reduce the mismatch that causes an imbalance in the power sent from the inverter to the main grid. The fuzzy logic controller is used to tune the proportional-integral (PI) controller to regulate the current and voltage of the grid-connected inverter by changing the gain of the PI controller (Kp, Ki) to obtain a fast response and improve the power quality of the system despite different load disturbances and inputs. The system was simulated in MATLAB/Simulink, and the results show the superiority of the proposed control unit, in which a pure and stable sine output voltage and current waveforms. Finally, the total harmonic distortion (THD) is improved to reach 3.81% based on the fuzzy PI controller, while 7.77% is based on the PI controller.
Assessment of hydropower projects with respect to sustainability criteria is a multidimensional and complex issue. It requires considering technical, environmental, and social parameters instead of purely economic ones in decision making for energy planning. The flexibility to consider several criteria and objectives simultaneously leads to the use of multicriteria decision making (MCDM) methods which are well accepted in the field of energy planning. This paper aims at applying MCDM methods in facilitating the decision makers to select the most sustainable hydropower projects in the Indian region by making real and logical choices based on eight important criteria selected from the literature that are compatible with sustainable development. To comprehensively rank hydropower projects three MCDM methods are applied i.e., the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluations (PROMETHEE II), and elimination and choice translating reality (ELECTRE III). Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to calculate the weights of criteria. All three methods are well adapted for sustainability assessment and ranked Sharavathi (A9), Bhakra (A2), and Upper Indravati (A13) to be the most sustainable hydropower projects in India under the selected criteria. The study will be helpful in sustainable energy planning of hydropower projects with similar geographical conditions.
Due to the great level of wind energy penetration in the existing network, huge efforts have been directed to enhance the grid-connected wind generator performance. This paper shows an application of a hybrid algorithm of the particle swarm optimization and the gravitational search algorithm (PSO-GSA) to enhance the transient stability of the grid-tied wind energy conversion system. The variable-speed wind turbine (VSWT) direct-drive permanent-magnet synchronous generator is connected to the network through a full-scale converter. The generator- and grid-side converters are controlled by utilizing an optimum proportional-integral (PI) controller. The criterion of the integral squared error is utilized as an objective function. The PSO-GSA based-PI controller efficacy is validated by comparing its results with that are obtained by utilizing the genetic algorithm (GA)-based-PI controller. The performance of the suggested control scheme is checked during various fault conditions. The control scheme quality is legalized by the simulation results that are obtained using MATLAB/Simulink program
