A Review of the Enviro-Net Project

Ecosystems monitoring is essential to properly understand their development and the effects of events, both climatological and anthropological in nature. The amount of data used in these assessments is increasing at very high rates. This is due to increasing availability of sensing systems and the development of new techniques to analyze sensor data. The Enviro-Net Project encompasses several of such sensor system deployments across five countries in the Americas. These deployments use a few different ground-based sensor systems, installed at different heights monitoring the conditions in tropical dry forests over long periods of time. This paper presents our experience in deploying and maintaining these systems, retrieving and pre-processing the data, and describes the Web portal developed to help with data management, visualization and analysis.Comment: v2: 29 pages, 5 figures, reflects changes addressing reviewers' comments v1: 38 pages, 8 figure

Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte

Real-Time Monitoring System for a Utility-Scale Photovoltaic Power Plant

There is, at present, considerable interest in the storage and dispatchability of photovoltaic (PV) energy, together with the need to manage power flows in real-time. This paper presents a new system, PV-on time, which has been developed to supervise the operating mode of a Grid-Connected Utility-Scale PV Power Plant in order to ensure the reliability and continuity of its supply. This system presents an architecture of acquisition devices, including wireless sensors distributed around the plant, which measure the required information. It is also equipped with a high-precision protocol for synchronizing all data acquisition equipment, something that is necessary for correctly establishing relationships among events in the plant. Moreover, a system for monitoring and supervising all of the distributed devices, as well as for the real-time treatment of all the registered information, is presented. Performances were analyzed in a 400 kW transformation center belonging to a 6.1 MW Utility-Scale PV Power Plant. In addition to monitoring the performance of all of the PV plant’s components and detecting any failures or deviations in production, this system enables users to control the power quality of the signal injected and the influence of the installation on the distribution grid

Environmental Observing Systems for Assessing Impacts of Land Use Change

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the application of technology solutions for enabling environmental research. This project develops a complete environmental observing system in support of an investigation of the hydrological and ecological impacts of land use change on the coast of South Carolina. The land use change study is an ongoing multi-disciplinary effort involving the collection of a large number of monitored and sampled parameters at Bannockburn Plantation, which is located near the City of Georgetown in South Carolina. Long term monitoring will support a hydrological and ecological assessment of the study site before, during, and after proposed residential and commercial development. There are three primary objectives of this work. The first is the comprehensive instrumentation of a portion of the Bannockburn study site for hydrological parameters. The second is the implementation of a wireless sensor network to support the remote acquisition of monitored data. The third objective is the creation of a reliable and robust software solution for transmitting and distributing real time observation data. Collectively, these three objectives provide a complete environmental observing system. Results of this work will benefit land use change research by providing access to real time observation data and enabling the integration of powerful analysis tools. This research will provide a basis for the development of future environmental observation systems

Development of Real-Time Interworking between IEEE1888 and ECHONET Lite Standards for Building Energy Management System

This paper proposes the development of interworking proxy gateway for real-time data updates between IEEE1888 and ECHONET Lite standards in a building energy management system. Both IEEE1888 and ECHONET Lite are developed as open standards and hence a support for application and equipment development. IEEE1888 standard uses XML message format and is suitable for a wide range of machine-to-machine communications. ECHONET Lite standard is a highly accepted standard in Japan and with emerging supports by equipment manufacturers such as for air conditioners. This development of interworking proxy gateway in this research thus enhances the ability and flexibility in building energy management system to be compliant with different communication standards, which could be useful for both user and manufacturer sectors in the future

Time domain analysis of switching transient fields in high voltage substations

Switching operations of circuit breakers and disconnect switches generate transient currents propagating along the substation busbars. At the moment of switching, the busbars temporarily acts as antennae radiating transient electromagnetic fields within the substations. The radiated fields may interfere and disrupt normal operations of electronic equipment used within the substation for measurement, control and communication purposes. Hence there is the need to fully characterise the substation electromagnetic environment as early as the design stage of substation planning and operation to ensure safe operations of the electronic equipment. This paper deals with the computation of transient electromagnetic fields due to switching within a high voltage air-insulated substation (AIS) using the finite difference time domain (FDTD) metho