The small-scale power systems favor the installation of self-excited synchronous generators due to their simple construction. Many configurations were reported in the literature but there have been always two issues: voltage regulation (VR) and total harmonic distortion (THD) of the output voltage. This paper presents an experimental investigation to improve the performance of single-phase, self-excited, synchronous generator (SPSESG) in terms of the VR and THD. The applied modification is the implementation of sinusoidally-distributed stator windings which implies a different number of turns in each slot. A typical lab single-phase synchronous machine was rewound with the proper number of turns in each slot and then tested against resistive, resistive-inductive, resistive-capacitive, and dynamic loads (induction motor).
The experimental results proved that the modified generator performance has significantly improved in terms of the VR and THD. The worst VR was recorded in the case of dynamic load and it was 6.5 %. While the highest THD was 4.5 %, at no load. These figures are much better than other configurations reported in the literature.