PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF PHOTOVOLTAIC PUMPING SYSTEMS USING SWITCHED RELUCTANCE MOTOR-DRIVES

A photovoltaic (PV) pumping system using a switched reluctance motor (SRM) is investigated in this work. The motor is supplied by a DC voltage through a simple switching circuit. This drive circuit is much simpler than the normal DC/AC inverter required to supply an induction motor. The efficiency, of the SRM is considerably higher than that of equivalent DC or induction motors. In addition, because of its simple construction, the SRM is cheaper than these conventional drives. These advantages give the proposed system higher efficiency and lower cost compared with other systems. In this paper, which has a substantial tutorial content, a design example is studied in detail to explore the advantages of PV pumping systems based on the new drive. Study of the performance of the proposed system showed that the operating efficiency of the motor is about 85% during most of its working time. The matching efficiency between the PV array and the proposed system approaches 95%. The major part of the losses takes place in the pump and the riser pipes; this loss represents one third of the total available energy.