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Improvement of the electrical part of Idénergie's hydrokinetic turbine

Idénergie develops the first domestic hydrokinetic turbine for rivers. Itaims at producing about 100W in a 1.4m/s river to power up remote locations.Idénergie’s turbine has two main advantages: a completely watertight shaftlessgenerator and an integrated smart converter. The first turbines are planned tobe sold in June 2014.To be able to test the embedded intelligence in the lab, Idénergie’s testbench must be able to reproduce river conditions. Measurements have beenperformed in a river and provide the torque developed by the river at differentspeeds. On the test bench controlled by a LabView program, the rotationalspeed is measured and the corresponding torque computed. This torque is setas the new command and makes the test bench behave as if it was driven by aturbine in a river.Idénergie’s generator contains a rotor made of permanent magnets.These magnets are provided by a supplier and their quality needs to bechecked. For this purpose, a magnetometer is designed and built. It contains 5Hall effect sensors which move at a constant speed above a magnet andmeasure its magnetic field. The magnetometer is able to compare magnets to areference and to detect the faulty ones. The sensors are also used to measurethe magnetic field of the rotor and show that the custom-made shape of themagnets has no influence on the sinusoidal field.The converter transforms the three-phase current to direct current andcontrols the rotational speed. This is done thanks to an embedded electroniccard, which is about to be working properly. The Maximum Power PointTracking algorithm ensures that the rotational speed is optimum in order toproduce the maximum power output. The code loaded on this card is written inits main part but needs to be tested on the test bench once the card will beoperational.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kth-147629
Date January 2014
CreatorsAncel, Julie
PublisherKTH, Kraft- och värmeteknologi
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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