AD for off-grid rural electrification

Supervisors: Professor Mohamed Pourkashanian, Professor Lin Ma and Dr Davide Poggio.

AD has a huge potential to supply the energy needs of small communities across the world where grid connections are not available or unreliable, with a potential to increase quality of life and boost local economies. AD can be used alone or integrated with other small scale renewables to create a system that provides renewable and sustainable power at lower cost and reduced carbon intensity compared with grid electricity.

This project will investigate the design and operation of such a system using process modelling in order to assess alternative configurations, operational strategies and scaling. The work will benefit from our existing academic links in rural India and will build on the recent BioCPV project which resulted in the installation of a 10kW PV/AD energy system in a rural village, the data from which will be used for model validation.

For further information contact Professor Derek B Ingham (d.ingham@sheffield.ac.uk).