Integration of Electric Vehicles in a Smart Grid: Challenges & Opportunities
Recently, the Electric Vehicles’ (EVs) market has witnessed significant growth and is expected to grow even faster in the next decade. This is becoming a challenging problem for the electric utilities in managing their power grid efficiently. Every grid system uses to be designed to fulfill a given demand and that’s what engineers take into account when dealing with it. Therefore, any excessive and unmanaged increase of demand caused by EVs integration in the grid without proper increase of generation capacity couldn’t be accepted without violating some design safety margins. With the development of smart grids, the challenges brought by the integration of EVs into the power system could be solved and can even bring more opportunities to utilities to respond faster to the intermittency of renewables and will allow for large penetrations of these renewables into the grid. Indeed, EVs’ large battery storage capacity could be used by the utilities to stabilize their grids during sudden fluctuation of the load or generation. This presentation will present these challenges and opportunities provided by the large integration of EVs into a smart grid.
IoT, AI, and Big Data in a pandemic era
The Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been proven to enhance many aspects of our life including economy, healthcare, security, education, etc. The recent outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how these technologies are needed more than any precedent time and how they have impacted and will impact every aspect of our society. This talk will emphasize on the role that these technologies are expected to play play in a pandemic world, and the impact that they will have not only on the health sector but also on individual lives (through smart home technologies for example), education (e.g., remote learning and remote labs and testbeds), transportation (intelligent transportation systems), economy, governance, security, etc. Finally, the technical challenges and requirements of these technologies, as well as some results and demos from the IoT Lab at Carleton University will be presented and discussed.
Motion Control of Biomimetic Autonomous Underwater Vehicles:
Towards an Effective Diver/Robot Cooperation
Abstract: Biomimetic Autonomous underwater vehicles propose alternatives for
conventional propeller-driven underwater vehicles. Median and paired fin (MPF) locomotion is usually suggested as a viable alternative when high maneuverability and hovering capability is required. In fishes, such a propulsion mechanism usually means lower speeds (as opposed to body and caudal fin propulsion) but is advantageous when low speed and precision
maneuverability is desired. A particular type of MPF propulsion is sea turtle like 4-fin locomotion. Attempts to copy the locomotion of those agile and versatile reptiles reach back at least a decade with Turtle 2005 and Madeline. Other examples include Finnegan, the RobotTurtle and iRobot Transiphibian. Another line of development is represented by AQUA and AQUA2 four finned amphibian robots that are unique in the way the propellers are used
both for swimming and crawling in and out of water. Four-finned propulsion was also realized in some prototypes by deploying a scaffold structure actively controlled by shape memory alloy (SME) wires. U-CAT is an autonomous biomimetic underwater robot developed within a European Union 7th Framework project ARROWS (Archeological Robot Systems for the
World Seas). As opposed to the previous examples, four-finned design of this vehicle is motivated solely by the end-user requirements and environmental constraints of the tasks in this specifically shipwreck inspection. It should closely video-inspect underwater objects.
When interested to control of biomimetic autonomous underwater vehicles various challenges are to be considered (highly nonlinear dynamics, time-varying parameters, strong coupling between coordinates, underactuation, etc.).
This talk deals with motion control of Biomimetic autonomous underwater vehicles, with a special focus on the case study of U-CAT turtle-like biomimetic underwater robot.
All the proposed control solutions will be illustrated through different scenarios of real-time experiments in a swimming pool (controlled environment), as well as in open water (real operating conditions).
Energy harvesting in smart industrial machines: Generating the energy you need from the sources you know
Abstract: A smart system can be defined as a system incorporating sensing, actuation, control and communication, in order to adjust to or inform about the system’s context or own condition. Through technological advances, particularly in microelectronics, “smartness” has been demonstrated in a number of application domains, ranging from smart healthcare and smart homes, to smart cities and smart industries. To realize smartness on large scale, however, the energy supply to the necessary technologies is still a challenge. Batteries have been the go-to solution in cases where a fixed electrical infrastructure is infeasible or impossible. Batteries, however, have a limited energy capacity and lifetime, resulting in maintenance requirements that are typically undesirable at scale. Consequently, the conversion of ambient energy sources – commonly referred to as energy harvesting – is investigated as an alternative.
In this talk, an introduction as to what energy harvesting is, what it can be used for, and what challenges it faces, will be given. It will provide a holistic view, covering examples of energy sources to be exploited, conversion mechanisms to be utilized, and implementation aspects to be considered for system integration. During the talk, concrete cases of energy harvesting systems for smart industry applications will be explored in order to provide tangible examples. Moreover, open research challenges for energy harvesting and self-powered smart systems will be addressed, and an outlook on research trends given.
Wind Power – A technology enabled by power electronics
The steady growth of the installed wind power, will reach 600 GW capacity in 2019, together with the up-scaling of the single wind turbine power capability – 15 MW’s are announced by manufacturers, has pushed the research and development of power converters towards full scale power conversion, lower cost pr kW, higher power density and need for a higher reliability. Substantial efforts are carried out to comply with the more stringent grid codes, especially grid faults ride-through and reactive power injection, which challenges the power converter topologies, because the need for crowbar protection and/or power converter over-rating has been seen in the past in the case of a doubly-fed induction generator. The presentation will first give a technology overview. Next power converter technologies are reviewed with focus on single/multi-cell power converter topologies. Further – case studies on the Low Voltage Ride Through demand to power converter are presented including a discussion on reliability. Finally, discussions about topologies for wind farms will be provided where they need to be operating like large power plants like a large synchronous generator.
Green Desalination Technologies: Electrostatic and hydro-magnetic Desalination Techniques
Unlike the conventional thermal/mechanical desalination methods, which separate water from salts, the hydro-magnetic and the electrostatic techniques separate the salt, in the form of ions, from the water stream. The extracted ions are then used to produce several industrial products, such as Cl2 and NaOH. Most of the commercial techniques suffer from either high cost of energy per m3 of fresh water in case of thermal methods, or high cost of maintenance in the case of reverse osmosis methods, in addition to the environmental issues associated with discharging highly concentrated brine. The environmental impact could be in the form waste lands to dispose the salty brine, harmful effect of the brine waste on the underground water, or adverse effects on marine life. The proposed techniques have several advantages over the existing techniques, including high water recovery ratio, low maintenance cost, efficient energy recovery, environmental friendly, and economical as the system could produce simultaneously several industrial by-products (H2, NaOH, Cl2, and many other products) instead of discharging the highly concentrated brine to the environment.
Industrial temperature measurement
When using temperature sensors – especially contact thermometers – in industrial processes,
they have to be adjusted to the corresponding demands for the respective processes in
industrial use. This concerns not only the demands for precise temperature measurement but
also the prerequisites for use; according to various planned uses, the sensor has to endure
extreme temperatures from -70 °C to 2,500 °C, chemical acids, extreme mechanical pressure
and fast changing temperatures and gradients. The sensor has to be maintenance free, stable,
and functioning for years at a time. At the same time, the demand remains to keep
developing more exact temperature measurement and even faster sensors. This places even
more extreme demands on the construction of the sensors, the selection of the materials used,
and also on the evaluation electronics and data processing strategies. Contact thermometers
often are use in a wide temperature range and under various medium and environment
conditions. In this case, the dynamic parameters (time percentage values and time constants)
depend on temperature itself. Several effects are superimposed. Constructive and material
properties of the thermometer and the installation location affect the dynamic behaviour as
well as the type and material properties of the object to be measured. Thermal conductivity,
specific heat capacity and density depend on temperature. At the same time, the dynamic
behaviour is also influenced by the temperature-dependent parameters of the media. When
the thermometers are installed in air, for example, the heat transfer coefficient decreases with
increasing temperature, owing to the temperature-dependent material data of the air, at
constant speed. At the same time, radiant heat influences have such a great influence that the
heat transfer improves despite the decreasing convective heat transfer coefficient. In our talk,
a number of examples are given. Both numerically and experimentally determined results
for the determination of the dynamic characteristic values are shown.
