THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LOCAL MADE INVERTERS (MADE IN NIGERIA) AND INTERNATIONALLY MADE INVERTERS

                                                             INTRODUCTION

In this modern society, electricity has great control over the most daily activities for instance in domestic and industrial utilization of electric power for operations. Electricity can be generated from public supply to consumers in different ways including the use of water, wind or steam energy to drive the turbine as well as more recently the use of gas. Generators, solar energy and nuclear energy are also source of electricity (Adeyanju, 2003).

In Nigeria, there is inconsistence supply of electricity by the power supplying company to the consumers. Hence the use of additional electric power source such as electric power generators and most recently the use of semiconductor power devices such as the Bipolar Transistor, Thyristors and particularly MOSFET to generate electric power in conjunction with a DC battery in few kilowatts. An Inverter offers a better additional power source to Generators as well as UPS considering its long duration, cost effectiveness and maintainability (Ganiyu, 2004).

An inverter is used to provide uninterrupted 220V AC supply to the load connected to its output socket. It provides constant AC supply at its output socket, even when the AC mains supply is not available.  It is a combination of inverter circuit, charger circuit and a battery.

The charger circuit keeps the battery charged when the mains supply is available and when the mains AC fails, the inverter circuit takes the DC power stored in the battery and converts it into 220V/50Hz AC supply, which can be used to power any common electronic equipment or computer systems. It performs the reverse role of rectifier where the AC power is converted into DC power and functions by chopping DC voltage through various means.

Most of the electrical equipment works with the 220V AC supply but internally, their circuit works on the DC supply. Hence the external AC supply is converted into DC supply by the power supply unit on these equipments.

Any device that works on DC supply can be used during the mains power breakdown by connecting them to batteries. But batteries have a fixed life and running power consuming equipment using the battery could be very expensive. Hence, rechargeable batteries can be used in this type of situation to reduce the cost. An inverter is used to power device that does not have the facility to connect to a DC power source or device that requires AC power source for its operation (Nelson, 2013).

The use of semiconductor power devices such as bipolar transistors, thyristors for voltage amplification, particularly the MOSFET as the power switches, makes the inverter a better additional power supply. The inverter is less noisy, provides complete automatic switchover function, posses no environmental threats, less bulky and less expensive to maintain.

OBJECTIVES OF THE SEMINAR

The main objective of this Seminar is to assess the differences between locally made Inverters (made in Nigeria) and Internationally made Inverters.

The specific objectives are to:

1. Determine the correlation between  locally made (Made in Nigeria) and Internationally made Inverters  
2. Compare and contrast the locally made Inverters (made in Nigeria) and the Internationally made Inverters
3. Make recommendation at the end of the seminar

BACKGROUND OF THE SEMINAR

An inverter is a device that takes a direct current input and produces a sinusoidal alternating current output. It maintains a continuous supply of electric power to connected equipments or load by supplying power from a separate source, like battery, when utility power is not available. It is inserted between the source of power and the load is protecting. In this research, the design, construction and performance evaluation of 1kVA pure sine wave power inverter is presented. The methods implemented for the design were DC-DC  converter and DC-AC inverter topologies.

The DC-DC converter in the design made use of a high switching frequency transformer, enabling the reduction of size of the parts and to meet the efficiency constraint, while the DC-AC inverter circuit made use of a microprocessor to digitally pulse the transistors on the inverter side of the circuit. The project was broken down into smaller components and tested individually at every different stage of the design by the oscilloscope and digital multi-meter for their unique specifications. After component tests, they were incorporated for final assembly and integration. The results of the oscilloscope and digital multi-meter tests showed that half-bridge converter produced square wave output waveforms, sinusoidal pulse width modulated controller circuit yielded modified sine wave.

After filtering, the full bridge inverter gave clean sinusoidal sine wave. The inverter was successfully converted 12VDC into 120VAC at 50Hz frequency and 1000W output power for a special laboratory equipment.

Power electronic systems are used widely to convert electric energy from one form to other using electronic devices. Four basic power electronics functions are AC to DC conversion, DC to AC conversion, DC to DC conversion and AC to AC conversion. These basic functions are used to build power supplies, DC transmission systems, electric drives and others.

Mobility and versatility have become a must for the fast-paced society today. People can no longer afford to be tied down to a fixed power source location when using their equipments. Overcoming the obstacle of fixed power has led to the invention of a DC/AC power inverter.

Companies, Industries, Organizations, Homes among the others are posed with a major problem of power shortage especially here in Nigeria. Although in developing countries, shortage of power is a problem commercially and domestically. New offices have tremendous load on already existing power generation sources. When added to rapidly increasing private and domestic demand, the situation, especially in certain urban areas becomes devastating.

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