Design and Analysis of a Battery Charging System for a Pico-Hydro Power Plant

Abstract

Pico-Hydro Power Plant (PLTPH) is very dependent on the received water energy, therefore a storage medium is needed to store electrical energy by using a battery and DC-DC Buck Converter as a regulator of the output voltage of the generator to charging the battery. In addition, it is necessary to design equipment in battery charging system. At PLTPH to adjust the generator voltage using a DC-DC Buck Converter 30A with an input voltage rating of 20V-70V and an output voltage of 2.5V-50V can be set for charging the battery. The battery capacity of this PLTPH uses 4 VRLA 12V 100Ah batteries which are arranged in 2 series and 1 parallel so that the battery capacity becomes 24V 200Ah with a load of the main PPYD Al-Ikhlas building with 4.2kWh of energy consumed. In testing the performance of the battery the battery is in accordance with the characteristics of the battery and the voltage is inversely proportional to the current, while the DC-DC Buck Converter has a large efficiency of 85% which shows the performance of the DC-DC Buck Converter is very good