Research Report - Energy Systems
This research addresses three major problems of energy systems:
1. Emerging problems and power systems analysis in a deregulated market structure.
2. Reliability of electrical equipment and power quality
3. Power electronics and systems engineering
Electricity industries in Australia and in other parts of the world have been going through the process of deregulation for several years. A number of new challenges are being confronted by the electricity industry. To address these issues our research includes pool price forecasting, generation bidding strategies, calculation of loss allocation and nodal pricing. The concept of pool price in electricity market is completely new and very little information has yet been published. Artificial neural networks (ANN) have recently been widely and successfully applied to forecasting and real-time allocation problems. Some of the modern methods that show promise in forecasting is support vector machines, boosting learning machines, time series support vector regression and recurrent neural Networks. Our research is aimed to investigate these and other possible forecasting methods and select the best method for electricity pool price forecasting and generator bidding strategies.
Following the deregulation of electricity industry worldwide, power systems tend to be more heavily loaded and more close to their security limits. The transmission services become one of the most critical elements in the deregulated power industry and security assessment becomes an important research. The school has expertise in the area of the analysis of the voltage and dynamic stability of power systems. The research in this area is concentrated on the development and application of methods for analysis, simulation and control of integrated energy systems.
For over fifty years, electricity has been produced by generators that conventionally operate at medium voltages, typically up to 25,000 volts. In 1998, ASEA-Brown Boveri (ABB) developed a new type of generator capable of producing electricity directly at transmission voltages as high as 400 kV. ABB has named the new high voltage generator the PowerformerTM. We have established a strong research link with ABB and a number of local generation/transmission companies. A number of investigations are underway which are aimed at technical studies of the interaction between the Powerformer and existing electricity systems, with particular reference to Queensland and Australian national systems.
Since electricity industry infrastructure was predominantly developed in the late sixties and seventies, asset management of aged electrical equipment and plants becomes an important issue, particularly in recent deregulated environment. Reliability and asset management of power systems equipment is a topic that has been studied for many years in this school. Work in this area has recently turned to a very important problem confronting all power authorities and other industries, viz. the assessment of ageing and remaining life of the aged power system equipment (with particular attention to transformers and underground cable systems). Accurate interpretation of measurement data and their usefulness for predicting remaining life are the most important questions to be resolved.
Most modern electrical and electronic devices such as computers, process controllers and communication equipment are sensitive to power quality problems. Our research focus has been on monitoring the quality of power supply and on theoretical analysis of the impact of power quality on electrical and electronic equipment using wavelets and other signal processing tools.
Power electronic converters can be found in all current consumer and industrial electronic equipment. Power electronics research is application oriented, finding novel solutions to problems presented in the fields of robotics, audio and servo amplification, electric and hybrid vehicles, photo-voltaic (solar) power generation, power quality, energy metering, and electrostatic precipitation.
Electric and hybrid electric vehicles (EVs, HEVs) have now been the subjects of research for decades, and many of the technologies are demonstrated. Similar issues exist in the emerging fields of renewable and micro power generation using grid connected or stand-alone photovoltaic, micro-turbine and fuel cell based systems. The Energy Systems group is focusing on the whole- system engineering problems of component selection, optimisation, control, integration, cost reduction and design for manufacture which will be required to achieve commercialisation of these vehicles and systems.
Associated Staff
Dr Zhao Dong
Dr Tapan Saha
Dr Geoff Walker
Dr Allan Walton
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