Abstract

Many renewable energy companies design wind turbine generators, solar panels, or electrical car batteries with different specifications according to their management philosophy. And typical commercial power converters are not universally designed for all different types of renewable energy systems. Because of this lack of flexibility and interoperability, a universal and scalable smart grid power converter design is desirable. Designing a robust controlled bi-directional power converter is the motivation for this thesis as the first step to develop a more universal converter topology connecting renewable energy sources and the electrical smart-grid of the future.

Renewable energy such as wind or solar power are promising alternatives with many advantages to traditional energy sources but they cannot provide a constant power flow due to the inherent variability of weather. For example, wind speed fluctuates depending on its elevation and solar irradiance fluctuates when moving clouds cover the sun. These example scenarios can be considered as uncertainty and one can assume that uncertainty is time varying as well. For these reasons, it is clear that wind turbine generators and solar panels cannot generate constant power levels and it may result in malfunctions in the converter and instability in the grid.

Advisor

Vincent Winstead

Committee Member

Han-Way Huang

Committee Member

Xuanhui Wu

Date of Degree

2018

Language

english

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering and Technology

College

Science, Engineering and Technology

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In Copyright