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This paper presents the economic feasibility analysis of a 2 MW Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) power plant in the open cycle. The plant can supply 6.35% of the average annual consumption of the electricity demand located at San Andrés Island (Colombia). On the one hand, the work presents the selection of the place to locate an offshore facility considering the technical viability while, on the other hand, the economic viability analysis is performed. The latter considers two scenarios: one without desalinated water production and another one with desalinated water. In this way, it is intended to first determine its construction’s technical requirements to analyse its economic performance. This approach allows us to have a general idea of the implementation costs and the benefits obtained with this type of plant, for the particular case of San Andrés, an island in the Colombian Caribbean with sustained stress on electricity production and freshwater generation. The results obtained show that the technology is viable and that the investment can be recovered in an adequate time horizon.

This paper deals with the optimization of maximum power point tracking when a photovoltaic panel is modelled as two diodes. The adopted control is implemented using a sliding mode control (SMC) and the optimization is implemented using an improved Pattern Search Method. Thus, the problem of maximum power point tracking is reduced to an optimization problem whose solution is implemented by Pattern Search Techniques, inheriting their convergence properties. Simulation examples show the effectiveness of the proposed technique in practice, being able to deal with different radiations. In addition, improved pattern search method (IPSM) is compared with other techniques such as perturb & observe and Particle Swarm optimization, after which IPSM presents lower energy losses in comparison with the other two algorithms, with the advantage of ensuring the location of the optimal power point in all cases.

En este artículo se propone el uso de un algoritmo de optimización basado en la búsqueda de patrones mejorada, aplicándolo a la estimación de los parámetros modelo de un diodo de una célula fotovoltaica. Los parámetros a estimar son corriente fotovoltaica, la saturación de corriente del diodo, la resistencia serie, la resistencia en paralelo y el factor de idealidad del diodo. La estimación es hecha a partir de los datos obtenidos de una curva conocida, es decir, que la celda fotovoltaica puede caracterizarse y los parámetros son extraídos de los datos de la curva. Los resultados son la identificación de los parámetros y la exactitud del modelo con respecto a la referencia en el punto de máxima potencia (MPP). Adicionalmente se realiza una comparación con el modelo obtenido con tres estimaciones realizadas con el algoritmo de optimización enjambre de partículas (PSO), bajo las mismas condiciones en cantidad de partículas y de iteraciones. El error encontrado muestra la similitud del modelo con la referencia obtenida de acuerdo con el algoritmo IPSM.