Supervisory control interface for experimental hybrid wind & solar energy system

Abstract

A supervisory control interface developed for wind and solar energy system and its control systems are presented in this thesis. The proposed system consists of a wind turbine, a solar panel and a load bank. A power electronics interface, based on various converters, is used to integrate the renewable energy sources. The main goal of the control interface is to maintain the balance between load demand and power supply. The objective of the proposed power management system is to ensure a proper control and coordination between all the sources and loads of the system. The developed power management system algorithm uses a basic cost function to control the power flow from both the energy sources. The supervisory control interface also gives the user an option to control the load priority from the front panel and provides user feedback in case of low power situations. An experimental setup is designed using the National Instruments equipment and LabVIEW software to test the developed control interface. Experimental results for various conditions are presented to validate the power management system algorithms developed in this work.