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Power Electronics for Smart Grids: Present and Future Perspectives

A special issue of Energies (ISSN 1996-1073). This special issue belongs to the section "A1: Smart Grids and Microgrids".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (10 October 2019) | Viewed by 10287

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Algoritmi Research Centre, Department of Industrial Electronics, University of Minho, 4800-058 Guimarães, Portugal
Interests: power electronics converters; electric mobility; renewable energy sources; digital control techniques; smart grids
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

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Guest Editor
Department of Industrial Electronics, School of Engineering, University of Minho, 4800-058 Guimaraes, Portugal
Interests: power electronics; power quality; active power filters; renewable energy; energy efficiency; electric vehicles; energy storage systems; battery charging systems; smart grids; smart cities; smart homes; technologies for innovative railway systems
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Multidisciplinary and emerging technologies in the field of power electronics are contributing to high power density and high-efficiency converters for interfacing fundamental strands as renewable energy sources, electric mobility, energy storage systems, and active conditioners, into smart grids. The present and future perspectives of power electronics concerning these strands aim to reduce the impact of climate changes and, at the same time, contribute to an equilibrium between sustainability and economic growth. This Special Issue aims to organize the present and future perspectives of power electronics in smart grids; therefore, original contributions are invited, including review papers, from different perspectives, including Ph.D. students, academic scientists, researchers, and professional communities. Potential topics of interest are related (but not limited to) the application of power electronics for the following:

Renewable energy sources and energy storage systems;

Electric mobility (e.g., G2V and V2G modes) and energy efficiency in transportation;

HVDC, SVC, and FACTS technologies;

Active power filters, hybrid power filters, and unified power quality conditioners;

Power quality, reliability, and security;

Unified topologies for power flow control in smart grids, microgrids, and smart homes;

Energy control and decisions, and demand responses;

Energy, and industrial, commercial, and residential applications;

Smart building technologies;

Technology and innovation for railways;

Fault-tolerant power electronic systems;

New semiconductor power devices (e.g., SiC and GaN) employed in power electronics;

New topologies of power electronics converters (e.g., multilevel and interleaved topologies);

New power theories and control strategies (e.g., model predictive and sliding mode).

Dr. Vítor Duarte Fernandes Monteiro
Prof. João L. Afonso
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • Active conditioners
  • Electric mobility
  • Energy storage systems
  • Power electronics
  • Renewable energy sources
  • Smart grids

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

25 pages, 6253 KiB  
Article
Asymmetrical Three-Level Inverter SiC-Based Topology for High Performance Shunt Active Power Filter
by Rodrigo Guzman Iturra and Peter Thiemann
Energies 2020, 13(1), 141; https://doi.org/10.3390/en13010141 - 27 Dec 2019
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 3536
Abstract
Power quality conditioner systems, such as shunt active power filters (SAPFs), are typically required to have low power losses, high-power density, and to produce no electromagnetic interference to other devices connected to the grid. At the present, power converters with such a features [...] Read more.
Power quality conditioner systems, such as shunt active power filters (SAPFs), are typically required to have low power losses, high-power density, and to produce no electromagnetic interference to other devices connected to the grid. At the present, power converters with such a features are built using multilevel topologies based on pure silicon semiconductors. However, recently new semiconductors that offer massive reduction of power losses such as silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs have been introduced into the power electronics field. In the near future, the applications that demand the highest performance will be powered by multilevel converters based on SiC. In this paper a highly efficient three-level (3L) topology based entirely on silicon carbide (SiC) semiconductors for a SAPF is presented and analyzed in great detail. Furthermore, the proposed topology is compared with other full SiC-based conventional topologies: two level (2L), three-level T-type (3L-TNPC), and three-level neutral-point-clamped (3L-NPC) in terms of efficiency. The proposed asymmetrical topology has an efficiency superior to conventional all SiC 2L and 3L power circuits when the pulse or switching frequency of the system is set higher than 60 kHz. Further, for high current ratings, the asymmetrical topology has the advantage that it can be built just by cascading two half-bridge SiC modules. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Power Electronics for Smart Grids: Present and Future Perspectives)
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18 pages, 446 KiB  
Article
Atomic Scheduling of Appliance Energy Consumption in Residential Smart Grids
by Kyeong Soo Kim, Sanghyuk Lee, Tiew On Ting and Xin-She Yang
Energies 2019, 12(19), 3666; https://doi.org/10.3390/en12193666 - 25 Sep 2019
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2497
Abstract
Most of the current formulations of the optimal scheduling of appliance energy consumption use the vectors of appliances’ scheduled energy consumption over equally divided time slots of a day as optimization variables, which does not take into account the atomicity of certain appliances’ [...] Read more.
Most of the current formulations of the optimal scheduling of appliance energy consumption use the vectors of appliances’ scheduled energy consumption over equally divided time slots of a day as optimization variables, which does not take into account the atomicity of certain appliances’ operations, i.e., the non-interruptibility of appliances’ operations and the non-throttleability of the energy consumption patterns specific to their operations. In this paper, we provide a new formulation of atomic scheduling of energy consumption based on the optimal routing framework; the flow configurations of users over multiple paths between the common source and destination nodes of a ring network are used as optimization variables, which indicate the starting times of scheduled energy consumption, and optimal scheduling problems are now formulated in terms of the user flow configurations. Because the atomic optimal scheduling results in a Boolean-convex problem for a convex objective function, we propose a successive convex relaxation technique for efficient calculation of an approximate solution, where we iteratively drop fractional-valued elements and apply convex relaxation to the resulting problem until we find a feasible suboptimal solution. Numerical results for the cost and peak-to-average ratio minimization problems demonstrate that the successive convex relaxation technique can provide solutions close to and often identical to global optimal solutions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Power Electronics for Smart Grids: Present and Future Perspectives)
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16 pages, 5015 KiB  
Article
Experimental Evaluation of a Control System Based on a Dual-DSP Architecture for a Unified Power Quality Conditioner
by Luís Monteiro, Bruno Exposto, Gabriel Pinto, Vitor Monteiro, Maurício Aredes and João L. Afonso
Energies 2019, 12(9), 1694; https://doi.org/10.3390/en12091694 - 5 May 2019
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2993
Abstract
An experimental evaluation of a digital control system based on a dual Digital Signal Processor (DSP) architecture is proposed for a three phase Unified Power Quality Conditioner (UPQC). A classical UQPC is constituted by two power conditioners, connected in series and shunted with [...] Read more.
An experimental evaluation of a digital control system based on a dual Digital Signal Processor (DSP) architecture is proposed for a three phase Unified Power Quality Conditioner (UPQC). A classical UQPC is constituted by two power conditioners, connected in series and shunted with the power grid, and sharing a common DC-link. In a smart grid scenario of operation, a UPQC will be fundamental for compensating power quality problems, also contributing to improving the efficiency of the electrical grids from a global perspective. The UPQC operation requires a bidirectional energy transfer between the two power conditioners, however, respecting some constraints, they can be controlled independently. In order to take advantage of this characteristic, the control algorithms can be executed on two independent DSPs, without any communication between them and maintaining the operational characteristics of the UPQC. Comparing with the classical control architecture based on a single DSP, with the proposed dual DSP architecture, the computational effort of each DSP is decreased of about 35%, allowing to increase the sampling rate. Therefore, the main advantages of the proposed approach are the minimization of delays caused by the processing time, which are very common in digital control systems, as well as the increment of the UPQC performance. Along the paper, detailed analysis of the processing speed and memory requirements to implement the UPQC control algorithms in both DSPs is presented. The paper also presents a set of detailed experimental results, obtained with a developed 5 kVA laboratory prototype of UPQC, which was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed dual DSP architecture. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Power Electronics for Smart Grids: Present and Future Perspectives)
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