Investigation on performance analysis of a small solar electric generator

Abstract

In the present study, we investigated the design and performance of a small hybrid magnetic generator. With small solar electrical generators, the permanent magnetics are replaced with an assisted rotating field. The rotor and stator were fabricated with a magnetic and coil windings unit, in which the rotor set includes 48 NeFeB magnets and eight salient poles with coil windings for the stator. The DC from solar energy assists the induced magnetic field of the copper winding, making the rotor rotational. The copper windings and permanent magnet bars significantly affected the rotor rotational speed and obtained energy output capacity. We investigated two different systems for the solar electric generator. For Case I, input and output energy capacities were 4.98Ah and 3.53Ah, whereas for Case II, the input and output energy capacities were 3.79Ah and 2.95Ah. To obtain higher performance, three different operating conditions were performed. We found that the condition with four copper windings running in on-off mode every 12 min and four copper windings running continuously produced the highest performance (133.33%). This means that the output energy is higher than the input energy. The results are expected to provide guidelines for designing small solar electric generators for rural environments. © 2021 The Authors