Design and Implementation of a Prototype Underwater Turbine Generator System for Renewable Microhydro Power Energy

This paper presents the installation and field measurements of a prototype microhydro power (MHP) generation system based on an underwater turbine generator. The studied MHP system employs the energy of flowing water in the agricultural irrigation of one of the irrigation ditches of the Yunlin Farmland Irrigation Association, Taiwan. The irrigation ditches are basically used for distributing irrigation water to different farmlands. To design the prototype, the MHP unit has to meet practical conditions of the selected ditch such as depth, width, water flow rate, total days of water flowing in a year, etc. The designed MHP unit consists of an underwater turbine, a gearbox, a three-phase self-excited induction generator with a switchable excitation capacitor bank, a three-phase diode bridge rectifier, a dc-to-dc buck converter, and a dc-to-ac inverter. A monitoring and control system based on an embedded system is also designed to measure the electrical data of the MHP unit.