Dynamic modeling, simulation and data logging of a hybrid power system for a remote house in Qinghai Province in China

Abstract

Hybrid power systems include both renewable and traditional energy. In China, some rural areas not connected to the grid are more suitable for isolated hybrid power systems than grid extension, because of lack of roads and infrastructures. Government’s policies have largely boosted the development of renewable energy, making the hybrid power system more affordable for those areas. In this research, the system is firstly sized for optimum net present cost using HOMER according to given weather data and generated hourly load data. Then, the transient stability of the designed system is checked through the dynamic modeling and simulation in Simulink based on each component’s dynamic equations and control system. Designed control systems, which keep the stable operation of the designed system, include a supervisory controller, MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracker), inverter controller and so on. Due to nonlinear and time variant load, the controller of the DC voltage regulator is designed based on a robust control method. A data logger with web transfer is then designed to monitor an isolated PV system. Sensor data are collected by Arduino boards and transferred to Thingspeak web server by the python program on PC. The collected data is downloaded and analyzed on MATLAB to analyze the system operation. Therefore, this thesis presents system sizing, dynamic modeling and its simulation results, a data logging system with data visualization on a web server and lab test results.