Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
University of Peradeniya
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
University of Peradeniya
Smart meters are the heart of the distribution system in smart grid. Smart meters are used to collect consumption data from end users as well as send feedback signals and control commands to the end user. A Research and Development(R&D) unit of Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) has manufactured a smart meter to collect consumption data. Under this grant a team from Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (DEEE), University of Peradeniya (UoP) came to an agreement with CEB to analyze and improve the developed smart meter and associated Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). The tasks were divided into three categories namely; Head End System Development coordinated by Dr. M.A.U.S. Navaratne;Wireless network and Communication coordinated by Dr. M.B. Dissanayake; AMI security coordinated by Dr. S.N. Karunarathna
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Solar PV penetrated as a green solution to the ever-increasing power demand in many parts of the world. However, one must be mindful about its inherent limitations. Firstly, no power is generated in the absence of solar power. Hence the generation comes to standstill when dark arrives, and it has been established that the effective generation is limited to 3 to 4 hours a day. Secondly, the latter generation is ensured, provided no disturbances occur during that limited time. The disturbances come in the form of shading by clouds which reduces the incident light and hence the power generated. The Figure 1 shows a typical shading scenario of a Solar PV plant of 100 kW installed capacity. The generation profile fits into a bell shape. However, there are drastic drops which correspond to shading by clouds.
The cloud condition depends on many factors such as the season of the year, local climatic conditions, wind condition, etc. From the electric grid point of view, it loses generation or experiences a reduction in generation whenever shading happens and is seen as a generation intermittency. This may not be a serious problem when the solar PV contribution to the network is in the order of 0.1% of the generation share and the rest of the network has sufficient spinning reserve. However, practically this is not necessarily the case all the time. Globally, solar PV is promoted as a greener means of mitigating the growing power demand and hence the global trend is that the generation share of the PV will be increased to reasonably high values as high as 20%. In this project, a Battery Supercapacitor Hybrid Energy Storage System (HESS) solution developed by the investigators at DEEE will be used to mitigate the intermittency problem in the solar PV systems irrespective of the installation capacity share.The HESS has the advantage that it has both high energy density and high-power density due to the co-existence of the battery and the supercapacitor respectively. The supercapacitor, though comes at a relatively high cost, solves the lifetime shortening issues of the battery due to discharges with high gradients.
The target of this project is to design and implement a complete eco system for the electrical vehicles, where the electrical vehicle owners can swap fully charged batteries by visiting a battery swapping station, once their EV battery state of charge is depleted. This project involves prototype mechanical system design, hardware implementation, implementation of the IoT platform to work with mobile devices to collect battery information, design of an optimization algorithm to maximize the profits earned in trading energy to the grid at the battery swapping station.
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As of today, Electric Vehicles (EVs) have become an attractive solution for the problem of air pollution in cities and the ever depleting petroleum sources. Almost all EVs have a battery, a power converter and an electric machine. When considering a conventional drive cycle of an electric vehicle, time periods of acceleration, braking and constant speeds can be observed. The highest power demand from the machine will occur during the acceleration and the power demand from the battery will be comparatively lower when the EV is running at a constant speed. In order to provide the high power required for acceleration, batteries with high capacity must be used, which also increases the weight of the vehicle while occupying a larger space.A solution has been designed, simulated and experimentally verified by using a supercapacitor bank along with the battery bank to provide power to the EV. The supercapacitor has been used to provide pulse power demand during acceleration and sink power spikes caused during regenerative braking operation, as it is a high power density and low energy density device. This allows the battery to cater the average power demand without current spikes. Thus a battery with smaller capacity can be used and also the life of the battery can be extended.
Lead tinning is one of the crucial parts of manufacturing electronic components such as inductors and instrumentation transformers. Currently it is done manually exposing the worker to lead fumes which is carcinogenic. In this project, it is intended to develop an industrial robot manipulator to replace the manual labour. This project is carried out on the MATLAB / SIMULINK realization of the PUMA 560 robot manipulator for position control. The focus of the work is on 1. robot manipulator analysis, 2. design of individual joint controllers, and 3. analyze the controller performance in the SIMULINK environment.
The controller can handle each joint individually without affecting the rest of the joints as expected. The developed model is able to reach any point within the work cell in 3D space when the reference coordinates of the end arm tool and its yaw, pitch and roll angles of it are provided.
Metal pins are used to connect the electronic components such as inductor coils and windings of the instrument transformers to the rest of the circuit. At the stage of manufacturing such electronic components, it is mandatory to insert the metal connector pins to the plastic holder of the inductor coil or the instrumentation transformer in the correct orientation and to the correct depth. At present it is done manually with low productivity. With the intention of increasing the productivity and also the quality of the work, an automated machine is being designed, which will be manufactured locally.
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