Smart regulatory circuitry

• Main Author: Tay, Jeremy Wen Cai.
• Other Authors: Tse Man Siu
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2012
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Electronic systems; DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Power electronics; DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Electronic circuits
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/49652
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

There has been an increased emphasis of harvesting renewable energy as an alternative source of energy. However the irregular or intermittent nature of the renewable energy pose great challenge in harvesting and converting or regulating the output energy to drive the specific applications. Traditionally, independent regulator (either AC-DC or DC-DCV converters) is built for each renewable energy source such as the wind turbine and the PV panels. The regulation converters are costly and bulky and only serves its primary purpose. Such approach is good for large scale renewable energy generation. Employing the same approach is not feasible for small scale applications which require harvesting multiple renewable energy sources from the environment and tapping on the energy storage for the power consumption in the 100W range, such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) tapping on the fuel cell and the solar cells on the wings or the solar-wind hybrid street lamp tapping on the small scale wind turbine and small scale PV panel. These applications are limited by the space or payload and the requirement for energy conversion efficiency. The intermittent nature of the renewable energy sources also makes the use of dedicated individual energy regulator for each energy source not cost effective. The traditional pulse-width-modulation converter approach for power regulation of multiple inputs and single output is not cost effective due to the use of multiple inductors for each input source.