An efficient and novel technique for electronic load controller to compensate the current and voltage harmonics

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient technique to switch on and off the dummy loads in an electronic load controller effectively. The electronic load controller is an essential part of pico and micro hydro-power generating units that provide stable and high quality electric power to consumers. The magnitude and frequency of the output voltage is kept stable by keeping the power consumption equal to the generated power; this is achieved by turning on and off multiple dummy loads through electronic switches. In the current scenario, the loads are switched on and off at random time intervals that produces a huge noise, harmonics and transients in sinusoidal current and voltage. Random switching of dummy loads looses a significant amount of energy in switching and damages electronic switches along with non-linear loads connected to the system. To tackle this problem, we have investigated different scenarios and reached to the conclusion that, if the zero-crossing technique is deployed for this purpose, the quality of the generated power will be enhanced. The proposed system is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink as well as Proteus. Based on Proteus software model a hardware is made and validated by comparing its frequency graph with results obtained from MATLAB/Simulink model.