Design and implementation of power electronic load used to test tidal current energy generator sets

Tidal current energy receives increasing interest as a green renewable energy. Power electronic load is a useful tool to test and evaluate the performance of tidal current energy generator sets. In this paper, a novel power electronic load scheme is proposed. There are four control mode, such as constant power, constant voltage, constant current and constant resistance. It is flexible and can be used to evaluate the power parameters, realize the Maximum Power Point Tracking etc. An three-stage load control technology is applied to improves the system response speed and control precision. The controller is developed based on STM32. The core control algorithm is Generalized Fuzzy Hyperbolic Model (GFHM) PID algorithm. The real time data may be monitored remotely via GPRS. The simulation and field testing results verified the significations of this scheme. Some valuable experience and data are obtained, and indicate that it is very useful for the further investigate tidal current energy power generation.