Power Quality Improvement in Conventional Electronic Load Controller for an Isolated Power Generation

This paper deals with the power quality improvement in a conventional electronic load controller (ELC) used for isolated pico-hydropower generation based on an asynchronous generator (AG). The conventional ELC is based on a six-pulse uncontrolled diode bridge rectifier with a chopper and an auxiliary load. It causes harmonic currents injection resulting distortion in the current and terminal voltage of the generator. The proposed ELC employs a 24-pulse rectifier with 14 diodes and a chopper. A polygon wound autotransformer with reduced kilovolts ampere rating for 24-pulse ac-dc converter is designed and developed for harmonic current reduction to meet the power quality requirements as prescribed by IEEE standard-519. The comparative study of two topologies, conventional ELC (six-pulse bridge-rectifier-based ELC) and proposed ELC (24-pulse bridge-rectifier-based ELC) is carried out in MATLAB using SIMULINK and Power System Blockset toolboxes. Experimental validation is carried out for both ELCs for regulating the voltage and frequency of an isolated AG driven by uncontrolled pico-hydroturbine.