Shun-Yu Chan

Development of a smart power meter for AMI based on ZigBee communication

Many governments deploy ubiquitous IT project, which aims to combine the latest wireless network and wide-band technologies etc. to accomplish a ubiquitous wireless communication network. The ubiquitous wireless communication network can be utilized for the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). Therefore, this paper tries to use the new wireless communication technologies to design and implement a ZigBee-based smart power meter. An outage recording system is also designed and embedded into the smart meter. The microcontroller of Microchip dsPIC30F series is used to develop the proposed smart power meter. A ZigBee system is then deigned and integrated into the proposed power meter, and used to transmit the detailed power consumption data and outage event data to rear-end processing system. The proposed smart power meter cannot only be used for power consumption data collection but also for outage event data recording. The proposed system has great potential to be used to build the area-based AMI. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed system. Besides, the application of ZigBee communication in power area may, expectedly, lead to make a definite contribution to ubiquitous IT project.

Development of an automatic reliability calculation system for advanced metering infrastructure

The installation of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is looked upon as a bridge to the construction of smart grids; especially, while most of the power meters are still mechanical ones without digitization. An AMI consists of smart power meter, communication technology, meter data management, and associated software and hardware. After AMI has been implemented, many advanced functions e.g. automatic and accurate reliability calculation systems can be achieved. Therefore, this paper tries to develop an automatic reliability system for AMI. A ZigBee-based smart power meter with outage recording function is designed first. The ZigBee-based power meters are used to transmit the detailed power consumption data and outage event data to rear-end processing system periodically. According to the detailed and accurate data stored in the rear-end database, an automatic and accurate reliability calculation system can be designed sequentially. The customer interruption costs can also be estimated by the proposed system. Experimental results show that the proposed system has great potential to be integrated into AMI to improve the accuracy of reliability calculation.

RFID-based autonomous mobile car

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system is looked upon as one of the top ten important technologies in the 20th century. Industrial automation application is one of the key issues in developing RFID. Therefore, this paper designs and implements a RFID-based autonomous mobile car for more extensively application of RFID systems. The microcontroller of Microchip PIC18F4550 is used to control the autonomous mobile car and to communicate with RFID reader. By storing the moving control commands such as turn right, turn left, speed up and speed down etc. into the RFID tags beforehand and sticking the tags on the tracks, the autonomous mobile car can then read the moving control commands from the tags and accomplish the proper actions. Due to the convenience and non-contact characteristic of RFID systems, the proposed mobile car has great potential to be used for industrial automation, goods transportation, data transmission, and unmanned medical nursing etc. in the future. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed mobile car.

Development of a Novel Power Quality Monitoring and Report-Back System

A novel power quality (PQ) monitoring and report-back system is designed in this paper to achieve the goal of real-time PQ monitoring and recording. The MCU used in the proposed analyzer is C8051F320 designed by Silicon Laboratories. C8051F320 is an integrated mixed-signal system-on-a-chip MCU featuring universal serial bus (USB) interface; therefore, it can be used for high-speed and large-quantity data transmission. A USB-based PQ analyzer with appropriately designed I/O interface and peripherals is designed and implemented firstly. Then, two human-machine interfaces (HMIs) designed for personal computer (PC) and personal digital assistant (PDA) are developed. The HMI for PDA can achieve the PQ monitoring with tiny volume and mobility requirements. Besides, a global system for mobile communication (GSM) module is developed and integrated into the proposed analyzer to realize the report-back system. When PQ indices such as total harmonic distortion exceed the predetermined limit, a message will be sent to operators cell phone by the short message service of GSM. Operators can then identify the PQ problems happened at the monitoring place. All functions implemented in this paper can realize the intelligent and real-time PQ monitoring and report-back system. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed system

Internet-based virtual power quality recorders

In this paper, Internet-based virtual instruments (VIs) for generalized power quality record and monitoring are developed. The proposed VIs is based on the LabVIEW (laboratory virtual instrument engineering workbench) language under the workbench of Windows XP. The major aims in this paper can be categorized below: 1) develop VIs for power quality recording and monitoring; 2) package the major functions of the power quality recorders into sub-VIs, and then the sub-Vis can be utilized repeatedly to improve the development efficiency; and 3) integrate the Internet capability into the proposed power quality recorder to achieve remote monitoring and recording. The power quality functions such as harmonic, instantaneous power, power factor, average power and frequency etc. are all presented in this paper. TCP- and Web-based Internet functions are then integrated into the developed power quality recorder. Test results show that the proposed Internet-based recorders can effectively realize the real-time remote power quality monitoring.

An RFID-based power meter and outage recording system

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is looked upon as one of the top ten important technologies of the twentieth century. In coming years, public area applications are the key issue in developing RFID. Power systems are innately bulky, large, and definitely, an extremely important application area for RFID. In power areas, RFID has great potential to be applied extensively to customers. Therefore, an RFID-based power meter and outage recording system is proposed in this article. The proposed system can be used to fully collect and record power consumption data and power reliability information on customers. A small-scale power meter and outage recorder is designed first and then an RFID system is designed and embedded into the power meter and employed to record the power data in tags. A handheld meter management system is also designed in this article to collect the data stored in the tags and synchronize the collected data with rear-end processing if necessary. Due to the uniqueness of RFID tags, the power consumption data and outage information on customers can be recorded and then identified in a rear-end processing system. Experimental results show the validity of the proposed system.

Artificial-lighting sources for plant growth

This study examines the use of artificial-lighting sources for indoor photosynthesis and proposes a novel indoor plant-lighting scheme in which red LEDs, blue LEDs and CCFLs are combined to work as effective light sources. The lighting combinations confirmed in this study have been proven effective in improving the growth uniformity of Anoectochilus Formosanus Hayata. Furthermore, the study has also demonstrated that lowered growth racks contribute to higher yield per unit area.

A Multiyear Transmission Planning Under a Deregulated Market

In a deregulated market, transmission planning plays an essential role on providing a fair and competitive environment. Due to different market architectures, this kind of planning is different from that of monopoly power industry. This paper proposes a multiyear transmission model under a deregulated market. This model considers investment costs, operation costs, and load curtailment costs for different load scenarios. In order to deal with this complex model, a genetic algorithm is used to solve this problem

The estimation of interharmonics by group frequencies

In this paper, an innovative concept, group frequency (GF), is proposed to facilitate the analysis of power system interharmonics as well as conventional integer harmonics. The concept is applied in the analysis of load currents of integral cycle controllers (ICCs) and other controlled power applications. A GF can be generalized for the analysis of load currents or voltages of other power devices. One of the advantages of the GF is that a large number of frequency components of a load voltage or current are simplified to a few frequency components without significantly changing the power quality impact of the load current or voltage.

Harmonic current characteristic analysis for wind turbines

This paper analyzes the harmonic current characteristic of wind turbines. Field measurement, data sorting, and analysis are conducted for wind turbine. Most wind turbines at present use a power converter and are equipped with harmonic filters, the control results of these equipments will become highly stochastic as wind speed changes. Even if there is a slight difference in the wind speed, harmonic output of wind turbine will be quite different. If harmonic currents are segmented and the probability density distributions are calculated, then different viewpoints as can be observed. Although harmonic currents of the wind turbine are stochastic, the probability density distributions are close to normal distribution. A stochastic harmonic current predictor is then proposed in this paper based on the probability density distributions of harmonic current. Test results show that the harmonic currents of a wind turbine in long-term operation can be effectively analyzed by the established probability density distributions.