December 2, 2010
School of Engineering, Bengaluru
One of the biggest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century is global warming. However, researchers from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham are working to create technologies to help avert an environmental disaster in the future.
Using wind and solar energy for power generation will help deliver the cuts needed in carbon-dioxide emissions in the critical period up to 2020, when greenhouse gases must peak and then begin to decline, to avoid catastrophic climate change.
Researchers from the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at Amrita’s Bengaluru campus have begun work on a project supervised by Dr. Manjula G. Nair to study ways in which to improve the power quality of wind-generated electricity.
The project involves the design and development of a laboratory prototype model of a digitally-controlled three-phase hybrid filtering system.
A study model of a windmill-cum-solar PV generating unit was installed on campus for this purpose.
“It is a wind energy-cum-solar hybrid model with 750W capacity,” explained Dr. Manjula. “The model will benefit all faculty and students doing research in the area of renewable energies.”
The model is already providing enough electricity to light the DST lab in the Dept.
“We are also planning to light up the street lamps inside the campus using the electricity generated from this model,” shared Dr. Manjula. “If we can harness enough power, we will also provide electricity to an entire campus block.”
Research is being conducted in the areas of power systems on automatic generation control, power quality issues and DSP/ANN/FPGA based digital controllers to enhance power quality.
Various final-year B.Tech. students are doing their project work in allied areas including FACTS, power quality, electric drives and control, microcontrollers, image processing, artificial intelligence and digital filters to support this initiative.
The project completion date is anticipated to be October 2011.
Currently India has the fifth largest installed wind power capacity in the world. Last year, India’s wind power capacity stood at 11806.69 MW. It was estimated that with improvements in the quality of wind-generated electricity, that capacity could increase up to five times.
Amrita’s research efforts will help. Through quality improvements, these efforts will surely help India achieve the targeted 65,000 MW through wind energy.
