Team Member(s): Alan Newbold, John Vuong, Elizabeth Cherry
Semester: Summer 2012
End-Product Description
The final product is a prototype for a dual hybrid power system that uses wind energy to supply power to a resistive dump load and energy from the electric utility to supply power to an inductive dump load. The wind turbine generator in the power system was constructed from scratch.
During operation, the power generated by the wind turbine generator is filtered for ripples by two 40mF capacitors and fed into the three-phase to single-phase converter, which is composed of an external rectifier kit and a power inverter. The switching of the power MOSFETs in the power inverter is controlled by gate voltage signals generated by the Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller. These gate voltage signals were created based on bipolar sinusoidal pulse width modulation. Afterward, the Arduino Uno microcontroller will monitor the single-phase AC voltage from the converter to the resistive dump load, and then, the Arduino Uno microcontroller signals the HC11 microcontroller to implement the power factor correction process if the power from the three-phase to single-phase converter does not meet the minimum load voltage requirement. During the power factor correction implementation, the power factor over the inductive dump load increases from 0.602 to 0.97.
Figure: Power Factor Correction Sub-system and Dump Load 
Figure: Single-Phase Power Inverter and Power System Microcontrollers 
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