Adaptive Backstepping Control of Marine Current Energy Conversion System

This paper presents a robust, lightweight, low-cost, pressure-resistant ocean current power generation system. This sophisticated power generation system consists of an unique horizontal axis turbine responsive to low marine current, a magnetic coupler, a permanent magnet generator, a controlled DC-DC converter and batteries for energy storage. A sophisticated CFD model of the proposed turbine has been developed and simulated using Flow3D. The energy conversion system has been built and tested in a wave tank. Both the simulation and tested results demonstrate that the proposed system can harness significant amount of energy from the sea current during low flow speed. A sensorless adaptive nonlinear backstepping control methodology has been proposed to extract maximum power from the turbine. The proposed controller is simulated in Matlab/Simulink and also tested in a laboratory energy conversion system. Both the simulation and experimental results are presented and fully analysed in this paper.