Abstract
M.Phil. (Electrical Engineering)
People living in rural and remote areas of Sub-Saharan Africa generally lack access to
electricity due to their geographical location and the costs associated with connecting these
areas to the national electrical grid. A viable technology to supply electricity to some of these
areas are stand-alone micro-hydropower systems which harnesses energy from flowing water.
Self-excited induction generators (SEIGs) are commonly used for the generation of electricity
in stand-alone micro-hydropower systems. The electricity supplied by a SEIG to the demand
side i.e. the load needs to be maintained stable under various consumer load conditions. This
can be accomplished with the use of an Electronic Load Controller (ELC). This dissertation
presents the design and development of an intelligent ELC that can maintain a stable voltage
on the demand side of a 3-phase SEIG supplying varying single-phase consumer loads. The
intelligent ELC consist of an uncontrolled bridge rectifier, filtering capacitor, chopper switch
(IGBT), voltage sensor, current sensor, optocoupler, Arduino microcontrollers and a ballast
load or storage, depending on site-specific requirements and economic viability. A fuzzy logic
control method is implemented to maintain stable and reliable voltage supply. Hardware-inthe-
loop simulations were carried out under various consumer load conditions using
MATLAB/SIMULINK to analyse and test the efficiency of the system in real-time. Laboratory
experiments were carried out and it was found that the Intelligent Electronic Load Controller
was able to respond quickly and efficiently to changes in the consumer load to maintain the
voltage on the demand side of the three-phase self-excited induction generator very stable and
close to the set point voltage value. The intelligent ELC will contribute towards providing
reliable and cost-effective means of enhancing the proliferation of micro-hydropower
particularly in rural and remote applications in Sub-Saharan Africa.