Design and fabrication of alternative power supply for marine vessel using wind energy

Abstract

Total power failure is one of the most crucial incident because it will result the particular ship to lose her capability to move or communicate with ships/land bases around. Total power failure usually only occurs when the generator or alternator of the ship fails to operate. Although ships been occupied with batteries for emergency purpose, but batteries can only be used until the electricity charge in it depletes by time according to its usage. This project presents an effective method to overcome total power failure by designing a hybrid system to generate power supply to the ship using wind energy. This thesis presents a design and fabrication of an alternative power supply for marine vessels using wind energy. The alternative power supply is only focused on ship emergency lighting system onboard Royal Malaysian Navy ship, KD KASTURI. The study, design and fabrication of the system covers wind turbine design, battery charging and control, power conversion and power supply to the designated equipment. This system is designed in such way that the alternative power supply from the battery charged using wind energy will be used to power up ship emergency lighting system for 2 hours during total power failure. Lantern type wind turbine coupled with a Permanent Magnet Synchronous Generator (PMSG) was designed and used in this project to generate electricity for battery charging. The charging of the battery is controlled using a MPPT charger controller. This project analyse on the charging voltage, charging current and the maximum time limit that the system can supply to the system during total power failure. As a conclusion from the obtained results, it shows that this is a reliable standalone system that able to supply power for ship emergency lighting during emergency period.