An experimental and analytical method for assessing the integration of electric vehicles into the bulk power system

In recent years, several trends are indicating a move towards a very different bulk power system. Increased integration of renewables, energy storage, synchrophasors, microgrids, Internet of Things devices, and electric vehicles are increasing the complexity of the system. While these changes have the potential to lead to significant reductions in environmental impact and peak demand growth, they also require significantly stronger, granular, and faster-moving controls to ensure reliability and resiliency. Previous research shows that electric vehicles have the potential to significantly reduce global (e.g., CO2), and regional (e.g., particulate) emissions associated with transportation. As fast-responding flexible loads, it was hypothesized that electric vehicles could participate in reliability-centric markets. To study the integration of these vehicles into the bulk power system, this project involved building an experimental charging system for electric vehicles with bulk modeling of the electric grid. This research test bed was developed in Taylor, Texas, to analyze real-world behavior of EVs in response to control signals. The diverse group of participating vehicles provided rapid response between 1/6 and 1/2 second, suggesting a strong capacity for providing grid reliability services. Successful real-world tests of primary frequency response and dispatched load control highlight the scalability of this approach. Vehicle charging patterns (as measured by load ramp and current waveform at peak) were observed to be clustered by vehicle make, indicating predictive value of high-resolution waveform measurement at the beginning of a charging session. Simulation of a network with intermittent renewables shows that inclusion of these rapidly responding EVs can strengthen system stability in normal, black start, and islanded situations. It shows that controlled EV charging can provide reliable means for improved renewables integration. The aggregation of electric vehicle charging can certainly provide fast-responding services that provide frequency support, congestion management, synthetic inertia, and many other useful services of significant value to the reliability of the bulk power systemElectrical and Computer Engineerin

Aerial Vehicles

This book contains 35 chapters written by experts in developing techniques for making aerial vehicles more intelligent, more reliable, more flexible in use, and safer in operation.It will also serve as an inspiration for further improvement of the design and application of aeral vehicles. The advanced techniques and research described here may also be applicable to other high-tech areas such as robotics, avionics, vetronics, and space

Safety and Reliability - Safe Societies in a Changing World

The contributions cover a wide range of methodologies and application areas for safety and reliability that contribute to safe societies in a changing world. These methodologies and applications include: - foundations of risk and reliability assessment and management - mathematical methods in reliability and safety - risk assessment - risk management - system reliability - uncertainty analysis - digitalization and big data - prognostics and system health management - occupational safety - accident and incident modeling - maintenance modeling and applications - simulation for safety and reliability analysis - dynamic risk and barrier management - organizational factors and safety culture - human factors and human reliability - resilience engineering - structural reliability - natural hazards - security - economic analysis in risk managemen

Fuelling the zero-emissions road freight of the future: routing of mobile fuellers

The future of zero-emissions road freight is closely tied to the sufficient availability of new and clean fuel options such as electricity and Hydrogen. In goods distribution using Electric Commercial Vehicles (ECVs) and Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles (HFCVs) a major challenge in the transition period would pertain to their limited autonomy and scarce and unevenly distributed refuelling stations. One viable solution to facilitate and speed up the adoption of ECVs/HFCVs by logistics, however, is to get the fuel to the point where it is needed (instead of diverting the route of delivery vehicles to refuelling stations) using "Mobile Fuellers (MFs)". These are mobile battery swapping/recharging vans or mobile Hydrogen fuellers that can travel to a running ECV/HFCV to provide the fuel they require to complete their delivery routes at a rendezvous time and space. In this presentation, new vehicle routing models will be presented for a third party company that provides MF services. In the proposed problem variant, the MF provider company receives routing plans of multiple customer companies and has to design routes for a fleet of capacitated MFs that have to synchronise their routes with the running vehicles to deliver the required amount of fuel on-the-fly. This presentation will discuss and compare several mathematical models based on different business models and collaborative logistics scenarios

Evaluation of the new Design Summer Year weather data using parametrical buildings

The Charted Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) updated the near extreme weather (Design Summer Year – DSY) for all 14 locations in the UK in 2016. This new release attempts to address the underlying shortcomings of the previous definition where the averaged dry bulb temperature was the sole metric to choose DSY among source weather years. The aim of this research is to evaluate whether the new definition of the probabilistic DSYs can consistently represent near extreme condition. London historical weather data and their correspondent DSYs were used in this research. Dynamic thermal modelling using EnergyPlus was carried out on large number single zone offices (parametric study) which represent a large portion of cellular offices in the UK. The predicted indoor warmth from the sample building models show that these new definitions are not always able to represent near extreme conditions. Using multiple years as DSY is able to capture different types of summer warmth but how to use one or all of these DSYs to make informed judgement on overheating is rather challenging. The recommended practice from this research is to use more warm years for the evaluation of overheating and choose the near extreme weather from the predicted indoor warmt

Age composition and survival of public housing stock in Hong Kong

Emerging notably in more developed regions, building stock ageing which is characterised by shrinking new completions and falling “mortality” has been posing challenges to various stakeholders in built environment. To find way out of this transition, we need to know how long buildings will last these days and the factors leading to their “mortality”. By using data from 1950s till to date, a comprehensive investigation is conducted to analyse the age composition and life expectancy of public housing stock in Hong Kong. What comes after are survival analysis and empirical analysis of those demolished to identify the key factors leading to demolition. Presented in this paper are the preliminary findings as well as the research agenda on the theme to model age composition and survival of both private and public building stocks in Hong Kong and other similar cities in Asia Pacific Rim such as Adelaide and Singapore, together with research activities to formulate policies for sustainable urban management