• Energy Research

Under normal operating conditions, a MicroGrid is interconnected with the medium voltage network; however, in order to deal with black start and islanded operation following a general blackout, an emergency operation mode must be envisaged. A sequence of actions and conditions to be checked during the restoration stage are identified and tested through numerical simulation. Voltage and frequency control approaches, inverter control modes, and the need of storage devices are addressed in this paper in order to ensure system stability, achieve robustness of operation, and not jeopardize power quality during service restoration in the low voltage area

This paper presents a long-term impact evaluation algorithm to assess advanced under frequency load shedding (UFLS) schemes on distribution systems with intentional islanding of distributed generation (DG). The algorithm is based on a combined discrete-continuous simulation model which is utilized to verify the effect of the schemes on reliability indices such as the system average interruption frequency index, system average interruption duration index, and energy not supplied. Moreover, a polynomial neural network-based approach to advanced load shedding is implemented to support DG islanding in order to illustrate the applicability of the evaluation. Simulation results highlight the long-term effect of employing UFLS to support intentional islanding of DG using an actual network from the South of Brazil.

The continuous growth of wind energy integration on electrical networks has led many utilities to impose fault ride-through capability to wind farms. This means that wind turbines must remain connected to the system during severe fault occurrence. Regarding the existing wind farms equipped with fixed speed induction generators directly connected to the grid, fault ride-through capability is commonly assisted with dynamic compensation devices, such as DSTATCOM units. These power electronic devices are controlled for voltage regulation purposes and behave like a balanced three-phase voltage source converter since commonly used control techniques are based only on the positive sequence of both voltage and current measured at its connection point. These control techniques are suitable only when compensation devices are operated under balanced conditions and therefore its performance when facing unbalanced faults needs to be evaluated. This paper tackles with this subject and the results obtained through numerical simulations demonstrate that over voltages can arise on non faulty phases leading to the wind farm disconnection.

This paper addresses the design, development and experimental tests of a prototype of fuel gas generation system based on biomass gasification for small-scale applications, around 5 kW. It comprises the small scale downdraft gasifier and the gas cleaning system aiming to clean-up the producer gas to be used in the upstream Internal Combustion Engine (ICE). The design of the downdraft gasifier prototype follows the methodologies that have been reported on the available literature. However, since these methodologies apply to gasifiers with larger rated powers, the adopted methodology is based on the extrapolation of the main parameters used for larger gasifiers design. For runing the ICE the producer gas requires to have a specific gas composition with an acceptable range of impurities. Therefore, a clean-up system was proposed following three stages: in first instance a hot gas clean-up using a cyclone designed to eliminate particles and compounds; then a heat exchanger was used for cooling the gas to condensate tars and water; finally a cold gas clean-up is performed by filtration using two filter steps: the first one using organic material (biomass) and the second one using a polypropylene cartridge filter. Experimental tests were performed using the developed imbert downdraft gasifier prototype, using pellets as feedstock. The preliminary results allow verifying several drawbacks that will difficult an effective integration of the developed prototype for small scale power generation applications based on ICE using low density feedstock.