Reliability Assessment of Battery-Assisted and Electrolyser-Battery Integrated PV Systems for Off-Grid Applications

John Kojo Annan, Francis Boafo Effah, John E Quaicoe

Abstract


Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems are usually the most obvious choice of renewable electrical energy installations for electrical energy supply. PV systems are generally categorized as grid-connected or standalone systems. In many applications, the most common type of storage used in solar PV systems is chemical storage, in the form of battery units. This paper considers the use of an electrolyser as an alternative storage system to convert excess PV electrical output into hydrogen gas for later utilization by Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC). In this paper, PV system involving battery storage units are assessed along with PV system having electrolyser-battery integration in terms of their reliabilities. The assessment involves review of the schematics of the proposed PV configurations, the determination of component failure rates and the reliability modelling of the system. Reconfiguring the system into power delivery mode with power delivery routes and storage mode with storage routes, the reliabilities of the systems were obtained. Applying probabilistic approach, the reliability for the combined power delivery route was given as 0.853013 whereas the direct PV supply route, the battery supply route and the fuel cell supply route gave reliabilities of 0.802564, 0.81723 and 0.827821 respectively for one year of the system life. The combined system reliability of the storage mode gave a value of 0.997483 whereas the battery storage route and the electrolyser storage route gave reliability estimates of 0.948448 and 0.930736 respectively. Further system analysis showed that the electrolyser-battery integrated system is more reliable but had some setbacks which included the fact that the battery had to charge after which the electrolyser could work. Again, the PV output should be greater than the load demand to enable the electrolyser work effectively. The electrolyser-battery integrated system is more applicable for large PV output system feeding varying loads at different periods.

Keywords


Reliability; Fuel Cell; Photovoltaic System; Fault Tree Analysis; Functional Block Diagram

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References


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