Aryadevi Remanidevi Devidas

Wireless Smart Grid Design for Monitoring and Optimizing Electric Transmission in India

Electricity losses in India during transmission and distribution are extremely high and vary between 30 to 45%. Wireless network based architecture is proposed in this paper, for monitoring and optimizing the electric transmission and distribution system in India. The system consists of multiple smart wireless transformer sensor node, smart controlling station, smart transmission line sensor node, and smart wireless consumer sensor node. The proposed software module also incorporates different data aggregation algorithms needed for the different pathways of the electricity distribution system. This design incorporates effective solutions for multiple problems faced by India’s electricity distribution system such as varying voltage levels experienced due to the varying electrical consumption, power theft, manual billing system, and transmission line fault. The proposed architecture is designed for single phase electricity distribution system, and this design can be implemented for three phase system of electricity distribution with minor modifications. The implementation of this system will save large amount of electricity, and thereby electricity will be available for more number of consumers than earlier, in a highly populated country such as India. The proposed smart grid architecture developed for Indian scenario, delivers continuous real-time monitoring of energy utilization, efficient energy consumption, minimum energy loss, power theft detection, line fault detection, and automated billing.

Design and implementation of user interactive wireless smart home energy management system

Electricity usage is increasing day by day due to the changing life style of home user and an increase in appliances in the home area network. Our proposed home energy management system for home users will monitor, manage and control the usage of home appliances, by reducing the monthly electricity bill. The proposed wireless architecture consists of an appliance control device called Wireless Enabled Electricity Manager (WEEMAN) installed next to a switch board or every device/appliance in a room. The central node called smart meter runs an algorithm called Availability Based Energy Management algorithm. This algorithm learns about the previous usage patterns of the appliances, collects real time power consumption of appliances from WEEMAN to generate efficient energy load patterns. The highpoint of the algorithm is that it gives an option for the user to set their monthly current bill and pro-actively control the operation of all the appliances according to the amount. We have developed a hardware test bed consisting of WEEMAN connected to some selected appliances and a smart meter to control every WEEMAN.

A system for energy conservation through personalized learning mechanism

Several challenges exist in developing smart buildings such as the development of context aware algorithms and real-time control systems, the integration of numerous sensors to detect various parameters, integration changes in the existing electrical infrastructure, and high cost of deployment. Another major challenge is to optimize the energy usage in smart buildings without compromising the comfort level of individuals. However, the success of this task requires in depth knowledge of the individual and group behaviour inside the smart building. To solve the aforementioned challenges, we have designed and developed a Smart Personalised System for Energy Management (SPSE), a low cost context aware system integrated with personalized and collaborative learning capabilities to understand the real-time behaviour of individuals in a building for optimizing the energy usage in the building. The context aware system constitutes a wearable device and a wireless switchboard that can continuously monitor several functions such as the real-time monitoring and localization of the presence of the individual, real-time monitoring and detection of the usage of switch board and equipment, and their time of usage by each individual. Using the continuous data collected from the context aware system, personalized and group algorithms can be developed for optimizing the energy usage with minimum sensors. In this work, the context aware system was tested extensively for module performance and for complete integrated device performance. The study found the proposed system provides the opportunity to collect data necessary for developing a personalized system for smart buildings with minimum sensors.

Enhanced emergency communication using mobile sensing and MANET

Emergency response services are often delayed due to the destruction or non-availability of the communication network. This research work proposes Mobile Adhoc NETwork (MANET) architecture integrated with mobile sensing concepts, for reviving the communication network in disaster hit areas. Mobile sensing in emergency scenarios can very well address issues like victim localization etc. and offer help in providing specific information about the affected area to the responders and control stations. This paper proposes a design that utilizes the existing the mobile devices such as smartphones, laptops, etc. in the field to provide the required communication facility. A new buffer system powered flooding methodology is also proposed to cater to the challenging environment. The mobile adhoc network architecture proposed is implemented and tested using several android based mobile phones. An android application named Android app for Emergency Communication (AEC) was developed and it enabled users to send messages to emergency services as well as their dear ones even when they are in regions with no cellular coverage.

High performance communication architecture for smart distribution power grid in developing nations

In a smart distribution power grid, cost efficient and reliable communication architecture plays a crucial role in achieving complete functionality. There are different sets of Quality of Services (QoS) requirements for different data packets transmitting inside the microgrid (a regionally limited smart distribution grid), making it challenging to derive optimal communication architecture. The objective of this research work is to determine the optimal communication technologies for each data packet based on its QoS requirement. In this paper, we have proposed an architecture for a smart distribution power grid with Cyber Physical System enabled microgrids, which accommodate almost all functional requirements of a smart distribution power grid. For easy transition towards optimal communication architecture, we have presented a six-tier communication topology, which is derived from the architecture for a smart distribution power grid. The optimization formulations for each packet structure presented in this paper minimize the overall cost and consider the QoS requirements for each packet. Based on the simulation results, we have made recommendations for optimal communication technologies for each packet and thereby developed a heterogeneous communication architecture for a microgrid.

Studying the impact of AC-microgrid on the main grid and it's fault analysis

This paper studies the advantages of using AC-microgrids and the impact of Distributed Generators (DGs) on the main grid by studying its voltage, power flow and calculating the losses in radial as well as meshed networks. For this paper, a grid of 4 houses and 3 DGs is modelled and simulated and the results were presented and analyzed. Fault analysis is conducted on the meshed system and the inferences were drawn. It is found out that due to the integration of Distributed Generators, the power is consumed locally and hence the active and reactive power losses in the system are also minimized. Based on the simulation results conclusions were drawn.

High-Performance Fault-Tolerant Data Caching and Synchronization Architecture for Smart-Home Mobile Application

Mobile devices are becoming the preferred choice for internet access as they are getting increasingly powerful and affordable. But because of lack of ubiquitous high bandwidth wireless internet, many mobile applications suffer from performance and reliability issues while accessing data from the servers. While many of the applications use caching mechanism to store data locally on mobile device to improve data access performance, they are not thoroughly focusing on related areas such as two-way data synchronization, fault tolerance and recovery, offline mode support and real-time update support. And hence even many reputed applications show inconsistent and out-of-date data; especially during network and battery outages. In this paper we propose usage of Replication process, Pending data process, targeted data update broadcasts to solve the above issues in the software architecture of Smart-Home project.

User centered energy management scheme for smart buildings

Because power grids experience dynamic variations in energy generation and demand, inclusion of renewable energy alone will not assure self-sustainability of smart buildings. Energy sustainability can be achieved by developing an energy friendly, context aware wireless sensor network which is overlaid on the existing electrical network. This smart environment is supported by efficient algorithms for dynamic energy management in smart buildings. Generally, the home energy management system has different functions. These include a) controlling the energy consumption at peak times, b) updating consumers about the real time power consumption inside the home area network, and c) helping the consumer to schedule the operation of appliances based on the real time pricing from the utility company. Also it is very important to analyze how the users can minimize electricity bills while achieving electrical energy conservation with a reasonable level of consumer comfort. The proposed availability based management algorithm (AMA) enhances the existing home energy management system by helping the consumers to supervise and control their monthly electricity tariff payment. The AMA performs an advance initial distribution of energy for upcoming days which helps to keep the power consumption of the residence within a stipulated limit. This research explains and demonstrates, using real data collected from an office building case example, how the AMA works in different scenarios. The results show that the AMA offers effective management of monthly tariff and energy consumption in variable use cases. From the experimentation result, the proposed system achieves 65.08% deduction in energy consumption with the energy unaware system and 30.16% deduction in energy consumption with pattern based energy management system.

Power theft detection in microgrids

Theft of electricity amounts to 1.5% GDP, of most of the developing nations like India. Hence there is a great need to detect power thefts in developing nations. In this paper, we have proposed a wireless network based infrastructure for power theft detection which caters to other functional requirements of the microgrid such as renewable energy integration, automatic meter reading etc. Algorithm for power theft detection (PTDA) which is proposed in this paper, works in the distributed intelligent devices of the microgrid infrastructure for power theft detection. The coordinated action of intelligent devices with PTDA in the microgrid infrastructure enables not only the detection of power theft, but the localization of power theft in the micro-grid. PTDA increases the 1) cost of communication 2) energy consumption of intelligent devices 3) packet latency, if any critical data is piggy backed with power theft data in micro-grid. To solve these issues, we have proposed EPTDNA (Efficient Power Theft Data Networking Algorithm) which uses the frequency of power theft detection and average power draw for power theft, for the efficient routing of power theft. The performance analysis and results given in this paper shows how EPTDNA solves the major issues with PTDA.

Micro grid architecture for line fault detection and isolation

One of the major problems power grids system face today is the inability to continuously deliver power at the consumer side. The main reason for this is the occurrence of faults and its long term persistence within the system. This persistence of faults causes the cascading failure of the system, thereby adversely affecting the connected loads. Traditional methods of fault isolation cause the shutdown of power to a large area to maintain the system stability. Today, localization of faults and its isolation is doing manually. Therefore, a localized fault recovery mechanism is very essential to maintain the system;s stability after the occurrence of a fault. In this paper, we have developed fast fault detection and isolation mechanism for single phase to neutral line fault in a three phase islanded micro grid scenario. The fault detection and isolation during the islanded operation mode of a micro grid is very critical, since bidirectional power flow is present. The fault detection mechanism we developed can detect and isolate the fault within a few milliseconds and localize the fault within a two second delay for both in single and bi-directional power flow scenarios. The proposed system is capable of locating the exact faulted segment with the aid of the communication network integrated into the power grid. The implemented system was tested with different ranges of fault current and the analysis showed that the proposed system could localize the fault with less than a two second delay.