Abstract
WATER HEATER THERMAL MODELING FOR LOAD SIDE MANAGEMENT STRATEGY OF SOLAR PHOTOVOLTAIC ON GRID /OFF GRID SYSTEMS
*M. Abouelela, Mohammed Jawad Al-Nakhli and Abdullah M. Al-Shaalan
ABSTRACT
This paper presents thermal modeling of water heaters for Load Side Management (LSM) strategy for household appliances energized through PV system. Our objective is to enhance the dependency on the solar power while reducing power consumption from the grid. The proposed thermal model of the water heaters helps the LSM control to manage the power available from the solar PV in order to optimize the function of grid connected PV systems. The concept of controlling power delivered to certain heavy loads while keeping their function has been recently introduced and applied. The inverter type air conditioning units use this concept to reduce its power consumption. In this work the concept is applied to the water heater where the power supplied to the heater is depending on the power availability from Solar PV. In the developed solution here, the power delivered to the heater is controlled according to the energy available from the PV source. The model uses PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) to control heating power. The model considers, the heating time of water to a certain temperature as an argument for the control algorithm. The developed algorithm continuously measures available solar power and uses the heater thermal model in order to generate the suitable PWM signal that controls the energy delivered from the grid when needed. The algorithm was tested using Matlab Simulink and the simulation results show the validity of the proposed technique for Load side managements. The algorithm is suitable for both on grid and off grid connections.
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