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This study relates to the enhancement in performance of a Hybrid Energy Storage System (HESS) over a DC microgrid, particularly toward a fast-accurate controller of the DC bus voltage. Conventional control methods are particularly difficult to implement in order to reduce start-up time with minimum overshoot, resulting in a significant disturbance of the DC bus voltage. To circumvent these problems, we propose an innovative hybrid controller method that combines the Integral Super-Twisting Algorithm (ISTA) controller technique with adaptive gain in regulating DC bus voltage and current. The capacity of ISTA to greatly enhance the system's dynamic responsiveness, guaranteeing steady operation with effective output voltage control, is by far its greatest benefit. Comparative testing found that the conventional PI controller had a rise time of 0.0666 s, a settling time of 0.165 s, and a 17 % overshoot with a steady-state error of 0.02 %. The proposed ISTA controller had a rise time of 0.0016 s, a settling time of 0.0667 s, zero percentage overshoot, and a minimal steady-state error of only 0.0003 %. The above-mentioned issues mostly focused on better sharing power in HESS and a more effective controller of the DC bus voltage. Furthermore, we evaluate the practical feasibility of the suggested controller through hardware-in-the-loop testing. This research lays a foundation for advancing renewable energy integration in DC microgrid, offering a promising avenue for sustainable and resilient power systems. Finally, the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed ISTA controller for DC microgrid use are proven with Controller Hardware-in-the-Loop (C-HIL) simulations.

The ambition of making North Africa a hub for renewable energies and green hydrogen has prompted local governments and the private sector to work together towards boosting the growth of locally available, sustainable energy resources. Numerous climate and energy challenges can be addressed by microgrid technologies, which enable cost-effective incorporation of renewable energy resources and energy storage systems through smart management and control infrastructures. This paper discusses the ongoing energy transition in the countries of North Africa, highlighting the potential for renewable energy sources as well as regional obstacles and challenges. Additionally, it explores how robust and stable controls and advanced management strategies can improve microgrids’ performances. Special attention is given to assessing the advantages and disadvantages of conventional and advanced controllers, with an emphasis on resilience needed within the harsh North African environment.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions becomes a top priority in the world with the emergence of global warming and environmental problems. Various renewable energies appear during the last decades. Ocean captures and stores huge amounts of energy, which could satisfy five times of world energy demand. Due to technology limitations and economic considerations, marine current energy appears the most attractive choice compared with the other ocean energy form. Although the existing expertise and technology in offshore wind energy conversion system can be partially transferred to marine current energy conversion system due to the similar structure, there are still many technological challenges to overcome. Meanwhile, the system operates under the water will inevitably have some negative or positive impacts on the surrounding environment. In this paper, it shows the interest and the principle of the marine current energy, and also discusses the advantages and disadvantages. The environmental impacts around the devices, the technological challenges, and the essential support structures are presented as well. The state-of-the-art horizontal axis turbines and their relative technologies and the latest projects are described finally. This review paper gives the useful information about the attraction and challenge of the marine current energy, and the newest development of the technologies and projects.

Due to the harsh and changeable marine environment, one low speed stator-permanent magnet machine named doubly salient permanent magnet machine with toothed pole is applied for marine current energy conversion system. Indeed, this machine has simple structure, intriguing fault tolerance, and higher power density, which could adequately satisfy the different complicated operation conditions. However, its permanent magnet flux-linkage has the same variation period as the inductance which leads to a strong nonlinear coupling system. Moreover, the torque ripple caused by this special characteristics, uncertainty of system parameters and disturbance of load greatly increases the difficulty of control in this strongly coupling system. Consequently, the classical linear PI controller is difficult to meet the system requirement. In this paper, the high-order sliding mode control strategy based on the super-twisting algorithm for this system is creatively utilized for the first time. The stability of the system within a limited time is also proved with a quadratic Lyapunov function. The relative simulation results demonstrate convincingly that, the high-order sliding mode control has little chattering, high control accuracy and strong robustness.

Considering the depletion of oil, coal, gas and other fossil energy, and the increasingly serious environmental pollution, all countries in the world are developing clean and renewable energy, such as wind energy, water energy, solar energy, etc., to alleviate the current energy crisis. Tidal current energy belongs to the marine renewable energy. It is clean, pollution-free, and abundant, with a good prospect of development due to its similarity with wind energy. This paper firstly analyses the reserves and distribution of tidal current energy in China. Then the early exploration of Tidal Current Power Generation System (TCPGS) in China is briefly introduced. Subsequently, it gives the details of the devices and experimental platforms of TCPGS that were researched and developed by various universities, research institutes and enterprises in China. The information mainly includes: the size and the capacity of the system, the support structure, turbine type, the selection of generator, and some river and offshore test information, etc. Finally, it discusses the similarities and differences between China and other countries in tidal current power generation technology, and summaries the current development status and gives the prospect of the TCPGS technology in China.

This study mainly investigates the current and speed control strategies of a doubly-fed induction generator (DFIG), which is applied to a tidal stream turbine (TST). Indeed, DFIG using integer-order PI (IOPI) controller has been widely proposed in the applications with a similar system, especially in wind energy conversion system (WECS). However, these conventional controllers cannot deal with the problems caused by the parameter variations satisfactorily under complex and harsh operation conditions, and may even deteriorate the performance. As a result, a fractional-order PI (FOPI) controller is considered to improve the efficiency and performance of DFIG-based TST in this paper. The FOPI controller, developed from the traditional IOPI controller and the fractional calculus theory, has a lot of prominent merits in many aspects, such as robustness, stability, and dynamic performance. In this paper, the proposed control strategies are embedded into the whole TST model which contains the tidal stream turbine, and the generator. The obtained simulation results demonstrate the prominent effectiveness and advantages of the proposed strategies compared with the conventional IOPI controller in terms of overshoot, static error, adjustment time, and robustness. It implies that FOPI controller could be a good candidate in TST applications.

The synthesis of a conformal poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) layer on Si nanowires was demonstrated using a pulsed electrodeposition technique. N-type Si nanowire (SiNWs) arrays were synthesized using an electroless metal-assisted chemical etching technique. The dependence of the SiNW reflection on the concentration of the AgNO3 solution was identified. A reflection of less than 2% over the entire visible spectral range was obtained for these structures, evidencing their excellent antireflective properties. The etched SiNWs nanostructures can be further modified by using a tapering technique, which further preserves the strong light trapping effect. P-type PEDOT was grown on these SiNWs using electrochemical methods. Since the polymerization reaction is a very fast process with regards to monomer diffusion along the SiNW, the conformal deposition by classical, fixed potential deposition was not favored. Instead, the core–shell heterojunction structure was finally achieved by a pulsed deposition method. An extremely large shunt resistance was exhibited and determined to be related to the diffusion conditions occurring during polymerization.