Savonius rotor based grid connected hydrokinetic power generation scheme

In this paper, a grid connected hydrokinetic power generation scheme with asynchronous generator coupled to Savonius rotor is presented. The Savonius rotor acts as prime mover to the asynchronous generator and thus, the proposed scheme presents a system with variable input power similar to that of a wind energy conversion system. In order to mitigate the effect of changes in input power to the generator and resulting variations in utility voltage and frequency which affects the system performance, an AC–DC–AC converter with a dc link capacitor is designed and modeled. The operation of the power converter is realized by decoupled d–q control method. A Matlab/Simulink model of Savonius rotor, asynchronous generator, power converter, LCL filters and control schemes is presented. The proposed scheme is tested under various load conditions under varying input power and the performances are observed to be satisfactory.