Special Sessions 13 | ECCE 2019 | Room 336, The Baltimore Convention Center, BALTIMORE, MD | Wednesday October 2, 8:30am – 12:10pm
This special session aims to help researchers, graduate students, and engineers remove the barriers to go real from power electronics simulations to experiments. It will demonstrate that it is possible to obtain experimental results within hours after completing simulations by adopting the SYNDEM Smart Grid Research and Educational Kit, which is a reconfigurable, open-source, multifunctional power electronic converter with the capability of directly downloading codes from Matlab/Simulink. The session will consist of 100-minute presentations and 100-minute demonstrations.
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Presentations:
Topic 1: Introduction to the SYNDEM Smart Grid Research and Education Kit
Speaker: Dr. Qing-Chang Zhong, Illinois Institute of Technology & Syndem LLC
A reconfigurable open-source multifunctional power electronic converter, the SYNDEM Smart Grid Research and Educational Kit, will be introduced in this talk. The main features and capabilities of the kit, and how it can benefit researchers, graduate students and engineers to go real from simulations to experiments within hours will be demonstrated. The reconfigurability of the kit to obtain 10+ different power electronic converter topologies and the capability of directly downloading control codes from MATLAB/Simulink will be demonstrated. Some typical applications of the kit for research and education in smart grid, microgrid, renewable energy, EV, storage, etc. will be discussed. Its versatile communication interfaces for SCADA and hierarchical control and the capability of multiple DAC channels for easy debugging and monitoring of internal signals will be demonstrated.
Topic 2: Wind Turbine Control
Speaker: Dr. Yeqin Wang, Syndem LLC
In this talk, a robust control framework for energy conversion of variable-speed wind turbines based on the SYNDEM Smart Grid Research and Educational Kit will be presented. Four aspects of energy conversion control of wind turbines will be demonstrated: maximum power capture from the wind, generator control, DC-bus voltage regulation, and power flow control for grid integration. Specially, the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithm without wind speed information, robust control of both turbine generator and DC-bus voltage, and robust power flow control without the requirement of the phase-lock loop (PLL) will be discussed. Furthermore, how to build a wind turbine testing platform based on two SYNDEM kits and motor-generator coupled system for the validation of control algorithms will be demonstrated.
Topic 3: Sustainable, Portable, and Efficient Electricity Delivery (SPEED)
Speaker: Yiting Dong, Texas Tech University
The delivery of sustainable and portable electricity to support critical energy demands is important for communities’ resiliency and recovery after extreme catastrophes and/or emergencies. In this talk, a sustainable, portable, and efficient electricity delivery (SPEED) system for community emergency/disaster relief will be presented. The SPEED system is a PV-storage integrated system with one SYNDEM Smart Grid Research and Educational Kit as the backbone. The kit is configured as a DC/DC converter cascaded with a DC/AC inverter, providing a power electronics interface for the PV panels, the batteries, and the AC loads. Advanced control algorithms are designed and implemented in the kit, which guarantees the autonomous operation of the SPEED system at either islanded mode or grid-tied mode to deal with emergency/disaster relief scenarios. Field testing results to validate the great potential of the SPEED system in contributing to sustainable and portable electricity demand during emergency/disaster relief will be presented.
Topic 4: 100%-Power-Electronics-based TTU SYNDEM Microgrid
Speaker: Dr. Beibei Ren, Texas Tech University
In this talk, an award-winning inverter technology, “the uncertainty and disturbance estimator (UDE)-based robust droop control”, and its implementation on a laboratory-scale microgrid named the TTU SYNDEM Microgrid will be presented. This microgrid consists of renewable resources (including a wind turbine emulator and a solar system emulator), energy storage system (batteries), a traditional generator, a utility grid interface, and two flexible loads. All sources and loads are integrated through eight open-source SYNDEM Smart Grid Research and Educational Kits connected on a common AC bus. The advanced power electronics control technology is designed and implemented into the SYNDEM kits, which guarantees an autonomous, robust, and stable operation for the microgrid. Experimental results will be shown to demonstrate how a 100% power electronic converters-based microgrid works.
Topic 5: Anti-islanding Protection in Distributed Generation Enabled by Virtual Synchronous Machines
Speaker: Dr. Mohammad Amin, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Embedding an anti-islanding protection (AIP) scheme with a high accuracy is a requirement for distributed generation (DG) in order to mitigate safety risks. This presentation will introduce a new anti-islanding protection (AIP) scheme for inverters operated as virtual synchronous machines (VSM). The main advantage of this scheme is that it can be embedded into the controller of the inverter without changing the inverter hardware or the core control algorithm with high accuracy. The scheme can detect any islanding condition through continuous monitoring of the active power, the reactive power, and the voltage magnitude mismatch, under different scenarios. Experimental results from an open-source SYNDEM Smart Grid Research and Educational Kit will be presented.
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Demonstrations:
Demonstration 1: DC-DC-AC grid-tied energy conversion system
Demonstration 2: motor drive system