Performance measurements of car engine based MicroCHP test device

Abstract

ne of the most important features of the smart grid is the Dispersed/Distributed Generation. Natural Gas is widely used for small scale urban heating purposes. The individual households usually have 10-30 kW heating capacity boilers. The huge amount of burning gas is capable of electricity production. The microCHP (small scale Combined Heat and Power generation unit) has lot of advantages compared to the traditional gas boiler devices. In the next decade the spread of over millions of new microCHPs can be expected worldwide. This paper introduces the experimental petrol/Natural Gas /Propan Butan fueled CHP unit made from a second hand car engine and a squirrel cage induction motor. The machine we built is capable of demonstrating all measureable features such as efficiency, emission, active-reactive power control, speedup, etc. In the paper we introduce the role of the microCHP-s, the development of the test device and the metered values