Artificial intelligence based solar/diesel hybrid water pumping system

Solar energy powered systems are increasingly being implemented in different areas due to the advances in solar energy technologies. Some of the major areas for solar energy applications include solar water heating, solar electric power generation, and solar water pumping. Solar water pumping has become the most adopted solar energy technology in the last decade. It has been considered as an attractive way to provide water in remote areas. A major advantage of using solar water pumps is that they are naturally matched with solar irradiation since usually water demand is high in summer when solar irradiation has its maximum values. However, solar energy powered systems are weather dependent. In most cases, a solar energy source has to be combined with another energy source to form a hybrid system to overcome the demerits of using solar alone. This thesis provides the detailed design, modelling and analysis of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based solar/diesel hybrid water pumping system. This research aims to develop an optimization model that uses AI techniques to maximize the solar energy output and manage the energy flow within the solar/diesel hybrid water pumping. Thus, the proposed system is composed of solar photovoltaic modules, battery bank, Variable Speed Diesel Generator (VSDG), Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) based Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) controllers and an Energy Management Controller (EMC). The EMC, which is based on Fuzzy Logic (FL), is responsible for managing the flow of energy throughout the hybrid system to ensure an undisturbed power supply to the water pump. The PV array, battery bank, VSDG are all sized to power a 5Hp DC water pump and the ANFIS based MPPT controllers are proposed for improving the efficiency of PV modules. The modelling of the system components is performed in the MATLAB/Simulink environment. For evaluation of the proposed system, several case scenarios were considered and simulated in the MATLAB/Simulink environment. The simulation results revealed the effectiveness of the proposed ANFIS based MPPT controllers since the controllers were able to extract maximum available power from PV modules for both steady-state and varying weather conditions. The proposed EMC demonstrated the successful management and control of the energy flow within the hybrid system with less dependency on the VSDG. The EMC was also able to regulate the charging and discharging of the battery bank.