System Design and Operation: Real-Time Simulation of Ocean Current Turbine in a Microgrid
Project Lead: Yufei Tang, Ph.D.
Affiliated Home Campus: Boca Raton
Affiliated Department: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
REU Scholar: Gabrielle King
REU Scholar Home Institution: University of Nevada Reno
PROJECT
As the world increasingly turns towards renewable energy sources, it is important to understand which sources can supply power reliably in order to avoid power outages. While some research exists on microgrids that implement solar panels or wind turbines, little to none exists about the reliability of ocean current turbines (OCTs) within a microgrid. To investigate this, we use a customized model of an OCT and a pre-existing wind turbine microgrid model. Wind turbines and OCTs operate similarly enough that replacing the wind turbine portion with an ocean current turbine and making some necessary adjustments is sufficient to model an OCT within a microgrid. Once the model runs within MATLAB/Simulink, we use OPAL-RT, a real-time digital simulator compatible with MATLAB/Simulink. This allows us to observe in real-time how the system performs despite events such as a fault, changes in flow speed, etc. occurring and, importantly, offers a realistic understanding of how reliably the ocean current turbine operates within a microgrid even under dynamic conditions. We find that OPAL-RT is a powerful simulation tool that can reduce costs, save time, and increase safety since we are able to gain understanding of how the OCT acts at an early stage of the design process. We conclude that the customized OCT model is able to reliably supply power, though in relatively small amounts (2 MW). Future work to be done includes increasing the amount of power that can be harnessed using the OCT, implementing battery energy storage (BES) compensation to further increase the reliability of the power supply, and hardware in the loop (HIL) simulations using a dynamometer to physically represent the OCT.