Comparative study of mono-pump and multi-pump PV water system and MILP effectiveness in water production improvement

In this paper, a comparative study of two photovoltaic water pumping architectures is carried out in order to enhance hydraulic efficiency over one year. The first is based on exploiting a powerful motor pump, while the second employs three pumping units to build a multi-pump water station for the same power range. Basing on the architecture nature, the first system is executed by a simple conditional algorithm, while the second is executed using mixed-integer linear programming as an optimal power-sharing strategy to maximize the water pumped volume. Static models of the different motor pumps are extracted from WinCAPS software and simulated using MATLAB. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the second architecture in energetic and water volume viewpoint.