Re: micro hydro load controller

On 2006-10-02, andy baxter <andy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

professionally. They are also working on a micro hydro system. This has
been designed and partly built by a professional engineer during his spare
time, but he has been unable to do any more work on it for some time (at
least a year) due to other commitments. The turbine and alternator are
finished, but none of the rest of the electrics, including the charge
controller for the batteries (it's going to be a DC system with an
inverter).

this altenator is it permanent magnet (like recyclesd smart-drive motor)
or electromagnet (like automotice altenator) based?



They have just got hold of a battery backup system of the kind which is
used to supply emergency power to alarm systems, emergency lighting etc.
(I think it used to run the emergency lighting for a nursing home). This
is designed to charge some 12V batteries from the 240V mains, and there is
also a separate inverter which supplies mains power from the batteries.

I was talking to one of the people there, and he was talking about using
the battery backup system as a charge controller for the water turbine. I
was advising him to be cautious, for the following reasons:

seems kind of ass-backwards to me unless he's planning on modifying the
charge controller.



- you need to have some way of shunting power to a dump load when the
batteries are fully charged and no current is being drawn, otherwise the
alternator may burn out.

ideally you'd want to turn the water off.

otherwise if you disconnect the altenator's output from no current will flow
and it won't heat up.



- The charger is as far as can tell (I may be wrong here though)
a standard linear regulator, which I am not sure is suitable for this kind
of application where the input voltage may be variable. I would have
thought that a switch mode regulator would be more suitable, as these can
deal with a wider range of input voltages. I think this is not so much an
issue as with wind power, since the speed of the turbine and hence the
output voltage is probably fairly constant, so should be tunable to
whatever voltage is required.

it really depends on the altenator they have.


--

Bye.
Jasen
.

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  • Re: micro hydro load controller
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