Diverse, remote and innovative - Prospects for a globally unique electricity network and market in Western Australia

WA’s electricity industry supply infrastructure comprises the South West Inter-connected System (SWIS), the North West Interconnected System (NWIS) and 29 regional noninterconnected power systems 1. WA exhibits a diversity of generation systems located in some of the most isolated regions of Australia, supplying a wide range of energy demand profiles. These characteristics and the unique networks that comprises WA’s electricity infrastructure makes WA a unique place to research, develop and integrate new technical options within a world-class industrialised electricity system

Diverse, remote and innovative - Prospects for a globally unique electricity network and market in Western Australia

WA’s electricity industry supply infrastructure comprises the South West Inter-connected System (SWIS), the North West Interconnected System (NWIS) and 29 regional non-interconnected power systems 1. WA exhibits a diversity of generation systems located in some of the most isolated regions of Australia, supplying a wide range of energy demand profiles. These characteristics and the unique networks that comprises WA’s electricity infrastructure makes WA a unique place to research, develop and integrate new technical options within a world-class industrialised electricity system

A novel DSM philosophy for building integrated renewable systems

This paper presents an overview of a novel concept in IT network design and power control focused on matching building integrated renewable power generation with local demands. It describes how this is achieved through combination of energy demand reduction and dynamic utilisation of embedded energy storage in a robust, efficient and cost effective manner. A brief overview of the main features of the design is given in terms of its intended benefits as an integrated system. The load components and distribution topology are described for this experimental system within the limits set by the capacity, capabilities and desired function of the network. Power supply to the network is described as including a back-up source to the photovoltaic (PV) source to add functionality and stability with no requirements for undesirable exporting of excess PV generation. The necessary configuration of the renewable array integrating with the network is also highlighted with an example compatible solar module device. A trial of the technology and demand management control in a high profile office building is described. This trial in a live working environment is providing invaluable real world data to compare against modelling and network simulation results

Design of Experiments Approach for Statistical Classification of Stereolithography Manufacturing Build Parameters: Effects of Build Orientation on Mechanical Properties for ASTM D-638 Type I Tensile Test Specimens of DSM Somos® 11120 Resin

A statistical design of experiments (DOE) approach was used to determine if specific build orientation parameters impacted mechanical strength of fabricated parts. A single platform (10- inch by 10 inch cross-section) on the 3D Systems Viper si2 machine was designed to hold 18, ASTM D-638 Type I samples built in six different orientations (called Location) with three samples built for each location. The DOE tested four factors: Location, Position, Axis, and Layout. Each sample within a Location was labeled as Positions 1, 2, or 3 depending on the distance from the center of the platform with Position 1 being the closest to the center. Samples were fabricated parallel with the x-axis, y-axis, or 45o to both axes (called Axis 1, 2, and 3, respectively) and were fabricated either flat or on an edge relative to the x-y plane (called Layout 1 and 2, respectively). The results from the statistical analyses showed that Axis, Location, and Position had no significant effect on UTS or E. However, Layout (or whether a sample was built flat or on an edge) was shown to have a statistically significant effect on UTS and E (at a 95% level of confidence). This result was not expected since a comparison of the average UTS for each Layout showed only a 1.2% difference (6966 psi versus 7050 psi for samples built flat and on an edge, respectively). Because of the small differences in means for UTS, the statistical differences between Layout most likely would not have been identified without performing the DOE. Furthermore, Layout was the only factor that tested different orientations of build layers (or layer-to-layer interfaces) with respect to the sample part, and thus, it appears that the orientation of the build layer with respect to the fabricated part has a significant effect on the resulting mechanical properties. This study represents one of many to follow that is using statistical analyses to identify and classify important fabrication parameters on mechanical properties for layer manufactured parts. Although stereolithography is the focus of this work, the techniques developed here can be applied to any layered manufacturing technology.Mechanical Engineerin

Modeling Storage and Demand Management in Electricity Distribution Grids

Storage devices and demand control may constitute beneficial tools to optimize electricity generation with a large share of intermittent resources through inter-temporal substitution of load. We quantify the related cost reductions in a simulation model of a simplified stylized medium-voltage grid (10kV) under uncertain demand and wind output. Benders Decomposition Method is applied to create a two-stage stochastic program. The model informs an optimal investment sizing decision as regards specific 'smart grid' applications such as storage facilities and meters enabling load control. Model results indicate that central storage facilities are a more promising option for generation cost reductions as compared to demand management. Grid extensions are not appropriate in any of our scenarios. A sensitivity analysis is applied with respect to the market penetration of uncoordinated Plug-In Electric Vehicles which are found to strongly encourage investment into load control equipment for `smart` charging and slightly improve the case for central storage devices.Storage, demand management, stochastic optimization, Benders Decomposition

Product line architecture recovery with outlier filtering in software families: the Apo-Games case study

Software product line (SPL) approach has been widely adopted to achieve systematic reuse in families of software products. Despite its benefits, developing an SPL from scratch requires high up-front investment. Because of that, organizations commonly create product variants with opportunistic reuse approaches (e.g., copy-and-paste or clone-and-own). However, maintenance and evolution of a large number of product variants is a challenging task. In this context, a family of products developed opportunistically is a good starting point to adopt SPLs, known as extractive approach for SPL adoption. One of the initial phases of the extractive approach is the recovery and definition of a product line architecture (PLA) based on existing software variants, to support variant derivation and also to allow the customization according to customers’ needs. The problem of defining a PLA from existing system variants is that some variants can become highly unrelated to their predecessors, known as outlier variants. The inclusion of outlier variants in the PLA recovery leads to additional effort and noise in the common structure and complicates architectural decisions. In this work, we present an automatic approach to identify and filter outlier variants during the recovery and definition of PLAs. Our approach identifies the minimum subset of cross-product architectural information for an effective PLA recovery. To evaluate our approach, we focus on real-world variants of the Apo-Games family. We recover a PLA taking as input 34 Apo-Game variants developed by using opportunistic reuse. The results provided evidence that our automatic approach is able to identify and filter outlier variants, allowing to eliminate exclusive packages and classes without removing the whole variant. We consider that the recovered PLA can help domain experts to take informed decisions to support SPL adoption.This research was partially funded by INES 2.0; CNPq grants 465614/2014-0 and 408356/2018-9; and FAPESB grants JCB0060/2016 and BOL2443/201

Species Identification and Profiling of Complex Microbial Communities Using Shotgun Illumina Sequencing of 16S rRNA Amplicon Sequences

The high throughput and cost-effectiveness afforded by short-read sequencing technologies, in principle, enable researchers to perform 16S rRNA profiling of complex microbial communities at unprecedented depth and resolution. Existing Illumina sequencing protocols are, however, limited by the fraction of the 16S rRNA gene that is interrogated and therefore limit the resolution and quality of the profiling. To address this, we present the design of a novel protocol for shotgun Illumina sequencing of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene, optimized to capture more than 90% of sequences in the Greengenes database and with nearly twice the resolution of existing protocols. Using several in silico and experimental datasets, we demonstrate that despite the presence of multiple variable and conserved regions, the resulting shotgun sequences can be used to accurately quantify the diversity of complex microbial communities. The reconstruction of a significant fraction of the 16S rRNA gene also enabled high precision (>90%) in species-level identification thereby opening up potential application of this approach for clinical microbial characterization.Comment: 17 pages, 2 tables, 2 figures, supplementary materia