Research Projects

The necessity for clean, emission-free energy that adheres to environmental regulations is a primary motivation for proponents of renewable energy sources. Photovoltaic systems, adept at consistently harnessing solar energy, can provide electricity to both rural and urban areas in tropical countries year-round; therefore, under the PM-KUSUM scheme, the government of India encouraging to install 17.50 lakh stand-alone solar agriculture pumps. Under this, individual farmers will be supported to install standalone solar agriculture pumps of capacity up to 7.5 HP for replacement of existing diesel agriculture pumps or irrigation systems in off-grid areas. As per the energy efficiency of a photovoltaic (PV) system concerned, partial shading is an important issue that further causes multiple power peaks (the power-voltage characteristic of a partially shaded PV array contains multiple local maxima and the global maximum power point). Results-in, modules of the PV array receive different levels of solar irradiation; these effects cause average losses of about 20%–30% in electricity production from the PV modules. The losses in a PV array depend on the shading pattern and the physical location of shaded modules. Moreover, maximum power extraction in solar photovoltaic water pumping systems (WPSs), especially in off-grid conditions, has prominent importance to run the water pumping system very effectively. This can be achieved with the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) method by rapidly converge toward a global maximum power point (GMPP) with negligible steady-state oscillation. Therefore, to leverage the losses due to PV array shading and to develop an effective MPPT controller, this project proposes hybrid strategy. In the literature, all the photovoltaic WPSs employed different approaches to improve the efficiency that can be categorized as increasing the output power and increasing the duration of operation. Over the last two decades, intensive research has been carried out to improve the efficiency by employing MPPT techniques, and PV array reconfiguration approaches were focused to enhance the duration of operation and extraction of maximum power. On the other side, hybrid strategy by implementing PV array reconfiguration with MPPT control to obtain improved PV system efficiency and duration of operation with maximum power extraction are not well exploited. Therefore, this project aim to develop a resilient WPS system by implementing novel hybrid strategies under partial shading conditions (PSCs). This work proceeds with detailed simulation, experimentation, and hardware in the loop to be performed on proposed strategies to make WPS more resilient. After development of the entire system, detailed experimental studies are conducted on various operating conditions. Further, all the features of the developed WPS have to be tested using a test procedure, including safety and protection for practical feasibility.