Worajit Setthapun

The integration and transition to a DC based community: A case study of the Smart Community in Chiang Mai World Green City

The Smart Community is a real living model community in the mountainous area that completely uses electricity from PV and distributes with DC microgrid in the range of 260 - 297 VDC. The Smart Community is located at the Chiang Mai World Green City of the Asian Development Institute for Community Economy and Technology (adiCET) in Mae Rim Campus of Chiang Mai Rajabhat University, Thailand. The community is comprised of 6 small houses, an office, a minimart, a coffee shop, a restaurant and an organic farm. All of the devices and appliances in the houses and farm are able to operate on DC microgrid, which include lighting, air conditioner, television, refrigerator, computer, water heater, and water pump. These appliances were modified to be able to use with DC as well as AC systems to increase the flexibility of power usage for the transition toward the DC based community. For the other buildings, both AC and DC grids are integrated in the office, minimart, coffee shop, and restaurant. For example during normal operation of the office, the air condition and lightings used the DC grids, but the copier machine and printers used the AC grid. The adiCET faculties, students, researchers and administrative staff used the Smart Community as the working and living place. Operation of the DC and AC usage as well as the issues occurred from the 4-years development were monitored and recorded.

The Development of Smart Farm with Environmental Analysis

This work is an on-going research to develop a smart farm system with environmental analysis for terrace vegetable farming with web application. The terrace farm is separated into 3 levels of moisture settings according to the type of vegetables that require low, medium or high moisture content. The environmental sensors monitor the moisture in the soil and send the information to the database of the farm server. The processed information from the sensors will be analyzed and then provide the appropriate environmental factors in plant growth. The smart farm can be monitored and controlled by web application. This smart farm is considered low carbon agriculture due to the power usage from the community microgrid of 25 kW PV system.

Development of DC Smart Plug Control System

This work focused on the development of DC smart plug for efficient data monitoring and transmission. The transmitted data were collected from smart plug sensors and user commands, and sent via wireless transmission to the online database. The results revealed that the smart plug could control and provide high speed wireless data transmission with minimal error to and from the appliances. The online media was also developed with the smart plug display the power usage and statistics.

Development of a Novel Software to Identify the Real-Time Energy (kWh) Flows among Multiple Loads and Sources Including Renewables in a Smart Grid

An innovative software has been developed to measure and identify energy flow for multiple loads and sources like Grid and or other renewables. Algorithms have been developed to indicate status of energy used within a building unit and the Smart Gird as a whole. The software is developed on the AngularJS bases in the model-view-controller (MVC) platform using PHP language and MySQL is used as database for recording the data. The results of this research can support Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT) for future grid planning and can be helpful for adaptive forcasting in connection with the consumption and generation. In the future, this software could be applied to improve the functions of energy management system (EMS) in the homes, buildings, and offices.