Fish Farm Electrification Utilising a Hybrid Device of Low-Speed Vertical Axis Turbine and Solar Panels

Abstract

The demand for seafood is continually increasing. The best way to meet that is through the aquaculture. In Malaysia, the important alternative source of fish supply is the fish-farms. Nowadays, fish-farms use unclean and expensive energy, which cannot meet the environmental and climate goals. This paper presents a hybrid device consisting of two Low-Speed Vertical Axis Current Turbines (LS-VACTs), generators, batteries, controller and solar-panels. This device is used as a hybrid solution because of the lake of electricity, low water/marine current speed surrounding the fish-farms and variable nature of both resources solar and marine-currents. This device has lower cabling and infrastructure requirements and reduced capital costs. This paper investigates the performance of the hybrid system and predicting power take-off and the number of solar panels required to provide sufficient energy for fish-farm using MATLAB-Simulink environment. The experimental results of LS-VACT show that the turbine has a power coefficient (CP) = 19.4% and high torque coefficient of 0.76 at a speed of 1 m/s. The simulation results indicate that the power output of the system can provide 20 kWh/day with water/marine current speed higher than 1 m/s. This combination of both resources can sustain and produce enough power for electrification of fish-farm.