Gearless micro hydropower plant for small water-course

Abstract

The paper focuses on problem of development of autonomous power-supply systems based on micro hydropower plants, which are using small watercourse power. The design and development of such systems is influenced by a number of conflicting objectives. The power source has to generate ac voltage with steady-state magnitude and frequency and, at the same time, it has to be fairly simple and inexpensive. One of the future-proof designs that provides fulfillment of the above mentioned requirements is a gearless micro hydropower plant with a combined impeller of axial-flow turbine and an electric arc-shape inductor generator. The authors have identified how geometrical parameters of the arc-shape inductor generator influences the machine operation factors. In addition, they have found that the air gap impacts the ripple factor significantly. Finally the paper shows functional dependence of the slot chamfer factor on chamfer angle, which simplifies the problem of choosing reasonable, in terms of efficiency, design parameters of the generator for the micro hydropower plant