Design and Implementation of a Grid-tied Circuit for Micro Turbine Generator

The MTG is one of distributed generations. The capacity ranges from several kW up to MW, which can be suitably installed at an industrial plant. The MTG is composed of a gas turbine, compressor, and A Cgenerator. They are inertia welded on a single shaft to simplify the mechanical structure of the system. Because the shaft turns at the speed of the turbine, the generator provides high frequency A C electricity. This requires a rectifier and an inverter to interface between the A C generator and the utility network. In this paper, based on the paradigm of current control, a new approach to control the power converter for an MTG will be proposed. By using the developed method, the micro-turbines can be driven as a parallel generator, where the operations of the proposed generator not only can be used to output the sinusoidal current with high power factor, but also is applied for active power filter, helping mitigating the power quality issues caused by the wide uses of nonlinear loads in the demand side. The method proposed in this paper is examined under various scenarios. Test results are not only beneficial for the design of micro-turbines, but also help increase the security and reliability of a future deregulation power system.