Robert B. Bass

Determining the Power and Energy Capacities of a Battery Energy Storage System to Accommodate High Photovoltaic Penetration on a Distribution Feeder

The integration of distributed energy generation systems has begun to impact the operation of distribution feeders within the balancing areas of numerous electrical utilities. Battery energy storage systems may be used to facilitate greater integration of renewable energy generation. This paper describes a method for determining the power and energy capacities a battery energy storage system would need in order to accommodate a particular photovoltaic penetration level within a distribution feeder, or conversely, the amount of photovoltaic that could be installed on a feeder with a minimal investment in power and energy battery energy storage system (BESS) capacities. This method determines the BESS capacities required to compensate both intra-hour and inter-hour load and photovoltaic fluctuations to achieve a flat feeder power profile. By managing the feeder power, the voltage drop along the length of feeder may be managed, thereby mitigating the voltage fluctuation induced by the stochastic nature of both renewables generation and load. Doing so facilitates system benefits, such as conservation voltage reduction, fewer operations of load tap changers, and voltage regulators, and allows for deferment of capital expenditures.

Fast sequence component analysis for attack detection in smart grid

Modern power systems have begun integrating synchrophasor technologies into part of daily operations. Given the amount of solutions offered and the maturity rate of application development it is not a matter of “if” but a matter of “when” in regards to these technologies becoming ubiquitous in control centers around the world. While the benefits are numerous, the functionality of operator-level applications can easily be nullified by injection of deceptive data signals disguised as genuine measurements. Such deceptive action is a common precursor to nefarious, often malicious activity. A correlation coefficient characterization and machine learning methodology are proposed to detect and identify injection of spoofed data signals. The proposed method utilizes statistical relationships intrinsic to power system parameters, which are quantified and presented. Several spoofing schemes have been developed to qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate detection capabilities.

Applying Scrum project management in ECE curriculum

Scrum is a cyclical project management technique whereby members of a development team work together to define product development strategies in pursuit of a common objective in an adaptable and incremental manner. We have found that Scrum is a promising approach for exposing students to project management of undergraduate engineering projects. But, the technique is not used often in undergraduate education, and it is virtually unknown outside of software engineering circles. We are experimenting with using Scrum in projects across several years of undergraduate engineering education. Our goal is to gradually expose students to project management in order to make their project experiences and learning more efficient and effective. We report on successful initial implementations in freshman courses and senior capstone design courses. Obstacles include expanding practice across all four years, accommodating a diverse student population, and overcoming a lack of experience in assessing Scrum project management.

A Simple GHz Resonator for Superconducting Materials Characterization

This work examines the design and operation of a longitudinal resonant cavity, paired with monopole send and reciprocal patch receive antennae, that couples radio-frequency energy to a superconducting thin film carrying high current densities (~105 A/cm2). The dielectric substrate supporting the film penetrates the waveguide, which operates in an evanescent mode below the design cutoff frequency of 18 GHz. Oscillatory vortex motion in the thin film is found to produce a small (~0.1 mV) dc voltage. When the niobium film is patterned to form an aperture that permits resonant conditions within the waveguide volume, the measured voltage increases by an order of magnitude. The increase is explained in the framework of the Larkin-Ovchinnikov model for quasiparticle behavior inside a moving normal vortex core. Operated near the superconducting transition, this device is useful for materials characterization, including the possibility to extract parameters including the pinning force. The authors suggest that the device could be used to characterize the pinning potential or to explore quasiparticle dynamics in superconducting thin films.

Mining PMU Data Streams to Improve Electric Power System Resilience

Phasor measurement units (PMUs) provide high-fidelity situational awareness of electric power grid operations. PMU data are used in real-time to inform wide area state estimation, monitor area control error, and event detection. As PMU data becomes more reliable, these devices are finding roles within control systems such as demand response programs and early fault detection systems. As with other cyber physical systems, maintaining data integrity and security are significant challenges for power system operators. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of multiple machine learning techniques for detecting malicious data injection within PMU data streams. The two datasets used in this study are from the Bonneville Power Administrations PMU network and an inter-university PMU network among three universities, located in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. These datasets contain data from both the transmission level and the distribution level. Our results show that both SVM and ANN are generally effective in detecting spoofed data, and TensorFlow, the newly released tool, demonstrates potential for distributing the training workload and achieving higher performance. We expect these results to shed light on future work of adopting machine learning and data analytics techniques in the electric power industry.