Development of a Prototype Uninterrupted Electrical Power Supply System using Compressed Air Storage from Renewable Energy Resources

Gul Rukh,Amjdullah Khattak

doi:10.22581/muet1982.2002.02

Abstract

Over the last two decades, Pakistan’s energy demand has grown exponentially with very diminutive measures taken by the government to fulfill the needs. The large power plant projects are cumbersome, take years to be completed and require plenty of time to get fully operational. The idea of distributed generation works well in this case. Renewable energy comes well into play when we talk about distributed generation but the dependability of renewable energy resources on back-up such as batteries makes them unappealing. The objective of this paper is to practically implement a backup for the renewable energy resources using a mechanical storage such as CAES (Compressed Air Energy System). The proposed model is a composite technology, which comprises of EES (Electrical Energy Storage) and electrical power supply system. Solar energy driven compressor is used to compress the air in a storage tank, which is used on demand to drive the generator coupled air turbine. The fact that the developed system is solar powered, no other fuel is used with air and it uses mechanical storage instead of conventional storage like batteries, which makes the developed prototype system efficient, economical and durable as compared to the existing CAES. This paper focuses on the thermodynamic investigation, design and finally implementing a prototype CAES for a small load as an un-interrupted power supply system.

Highlights

Electricity is considered as a backbone of any economy and most dynamic gadget of socioeconomic progress of a country
This study is carried out to scrutinize the already developed models of CAES, which utilize the natural gas as a part of fuel and are burnt together with air to be supplied to the expansion turbine coupled with generator whose overall efficiency is as low as 50%
The proposed model is developed to be used on small scale basis to supply a small load. In this case a pneumatic motor is used as an air turbine to drive a small generator

Summary

Introduction

Electricity is considered as a backbone of any economy and most dynamic gadget of socioeconomic progress of a country. It is the key concern of every government to ensure electricity access to the growing industries and to the poor parts of the population. Pakistan's electrical power supply against the demand has remained an unresolved matter since many years. Despite all the measures taken by the Pakistani government, only 67% of its population has an access to electricity. The situation where demand surpasses the supply, is dealt with load shedding through power cut down. One third of the total population has to face a load shedding of 12-16 hours [1]

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