Team:
- Ashish Joglekar (RBCCPS)
- Rajesh Sundaresan (RBCCPS/Electrical Communication Engineering)
- Gurunath Gurrala (Electrical Engineering)
Solar PV plant monitoring and maintenance
Large scale Solar PV plants need to be kept operational at their full capacity with minimal downtime. However, there are many possible failure modes in PV installations. Identifying and locating a fault in a large scale plant is a challenging task. We have developed a low-cost online IV tracer that sits at the junction box level to help identify and locate faults on a per string basis. Our unique power topology can provide an IV trace without the need to bring the plant offline (disconnection of the load). An analytics engine is also being developed that maps the shape of the recorded trace to a corresponding failure mode. The outputs take the form of cleaning schedules, maintenance alerts, fault diagnosis and localization.
Smart grid solutions: Smart switch
A smart switch is an integral part of the smart grid infrastructure. It helps enable solutions like home automation, demand response matching, peak load shaving/shifting. We have developed a low cost smart switch solution that provides remote and manual load control. In the event of network or controller failure the switch has a failsafe fall back to manual mode. This is accomplished with minimal additional hardware resulting in a low cost small factor device. The failsafe fallback circuit is patent pending.
Smart grid solutions: Intelligent electronic device
A low-cost intelligent electronic device (IED) has been developed with distribution level Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) functionality. This device will sit at the distribution transformer level to measure three phase voltage and current at a maximum sampling rate of 64KHz . Multiple IEDs will form a “distributed” Distribution Management System. The device has enough edge compute capability to host distributed analytics (e.g. grid state estimation etc.). There is also a special emphasis on security.
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Online I-V Tracer for per string monitoring and maintenance of PV panels: Talk by Ashish Joglekar
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