Distribution Strategy and Management
A good distribution and control of all these components is necessary to ensure maximum efficiency of our system. The water collected needs to be separated into the water that will be redistributed and the water that will be used to produce electricity. Similarly the electricity produced will be redistributed to the village as well as to the water purifier.
So the first question that arises is how should the electricity be allocated?
The amount of electricity produced depends directly on the speed of the water in the stream. This can be assumed to be constant throughout the year and therefore a constant amount of electricity generated. However the demand for electricity cannot be assumed to be constant. Indeed the demand for electricity will depend on the population activities as well as other factors and will not remain constant throughout the year.
Several measures will be taken to match the electricity supplied to the demand:
Firstly, there will be no use of switches. The electricity will feed light bulbs implemented in public areas around the village. These light bulb will be switched on and off by a timer that will be set to the times of most necessity, such as evenings and winters. In the same manner, heating could be provided during cold periods of the year. This strategy will greatly reduce the fluctuation of demand, which is a great advantage in the design of our system, but it will also help to provide best to the needs of the population.
Secondly, we still need to take into account faulty light bulbs and other problems in the circuitry as they reduce the demand and create a disparity with the constant amount of energy supplied. This can be overcome by adding a circuit breaker to our design. It will prevent our generator from supplying to overloads or short circuits.
A constant amount of electricity will be then supplied to the village and to the water purification. The distribution can be arranged using the equation:
Power to be generated = N*Phouse + L*k*Plighting + Ppublic+ T* Pcleaning + Ploss
Therefore for a given power produced, we will be able to plan and adapt the village power consumption.
Where the equation parameters are:
N=Number of houses in the village.
L (m): Length of path to be lighted.
K: Number of bulb needed per meter (To be determined in the field).
Plighting (W): For example using 7W Led bulb.
PHouse: Power supplied to each house, this should be a constant value for all houses
PPublic: Power supplied to common area. For example 800W for one big common fridge (400W) and may be a virtual school (400W).
T (h): Time when the electrolyses will be working, depending on the volume of purified water needed.
PClean= 40W: Power needed to clean ten litre of water in one hour, when using 10 separate containers of 1L connected in parallel.
PLoss: Overall power loss.
In the next section we discuss our costings