Modeling of Hydrogen Production in an Alkaline Electrolyser System Connected with a Solar Photovoltaic Panel or a Wind Turbine: Case Study;Douala-Cameroon

This article is in the field of research into the storage of renewable energy production. One of the main obstacles to the rapid development of renewable energies is the storage of the energy produced at low cost and with good efficiency. The production of hydrogen from renewable energies is a promising solution. The present work evaluates the potential of hydrogen production by electrolysis from solar photovoltaic and wind renewable energies in the city of Douala in Cameroon. The methodological approach used is based on the semi-empirical modelling approach of an alkaline electrolyser associated with the solar panel or the wind turbine. The simulation results obtained on the MATLAB/Simulink platform show that the average hydrogen production potential is estimated at 0.55 Nm3/h for a PV panel supply, which corresponds to average energy efficiency of 70%, and at 0.675 Nm3/h for a wind turbine supply, which corresponds to average energy efficiency of 84%. These results show the need to promote this technology, whose efficiency can be improved depending on the choice of site.

The Detection of Inter-Turn Short Circuits in the Stator Windings of Sensorless Operating Induction Motors

This work proposes an alternative strategy to the use of a speed sensor in the implementation of active and reactive power based model reference adaptive system (PQ-MRAS) estimator in order to calculate the rotor and stator resistances of an induction motor (IM) and the use of these parameters for the detection of inter-turn short circuits (ITSC) faults in the stator of this motor. The rotor and stator resistance estimation part of the IM is performed by the PQ-MRAS method in which the rotor angular velocity is reconstructed from the interconnected high gain observer (IHGO). The ITSC fault detection part is done by the derivation of stator resistance estimated by the PQ-MRAS estimator. In addition to the speed sensorless detection of ITSC faults of the IM, an approach to determine the number of shorted turns based on the difference between the phase current of the healthy and faulty machine is proposed. Simulation results obtained from the MATLAB/Simulink platform have shown that the PQ-MRAS estimator using an interconnected high-gain observer gives very similar results to those using the speed sensor. The estimation errors in the cases of speed variation and load torque are almost identical. Variations in stator and rotor resistances influence the performance of the observer and lead to poor estimation of the rotor resistance. The results of ITSC fault detection using IHGO are very similar to the results in the literature using the same diagnostic approach with a speed sensor.