Finite element formulation to study thermal stresses in nanoencapsulated phase change materials for energy storage

Nanoencapsulated phase change materials (nePCMs) – which are composed of a core with a phase change material and of a shell that envelopes the core – are currently under research for heat storage applications. Mechanically, one problem encountered in the synthesis of nePCMs is the failure of the shell due to thermal stresses during heating/cooling cycles. Thus, a compromise between shell and core volumes must be found to guarantee both mechanical reliability and heat storage capacity. At present, this compromise is commonly achieved by trial and error experiments or by using simple analytical solutions. On this ground, the current work presents a thermodynamically consistent and three-dimensional finite element (FE) formulation considering both solid and liquid phases to study thermal stresses in nePCMs. Despite the fact that there are several phase change FE formulations in the literature, the main novelty of the present work is its monolithic coupling – no staggered approaches are required – between thermal and mechanical fields. Then, the FE formulation is implemented in a computational code and it is validated against one-dimensional analytical solutions. Finally, the FE model is used to perform a thermal stress analysis for different nePCM geometries and materials to predict their mechanical failure by using Rankine’s criterion

On the Impact of Wireless Jamming on the Distributed Secondary Microgrid Control

The secondary control in direct current microgrids (MGs) is used to restore the voltage deviations caused by the primary droop control, where the latter is implemented locally in each distributed generator and reacts to load variations. Numerous recent works propose to implement the secondary control in a distributed fashion, relying on a communication system to achieve consensus among MG units. This paper shows that, if the system is not designed to cope with adversary communication impairments, then a malicious attacker can apply a simple jamming of a few units of the MG and thus compromise the secondary MG control. Compared to other denial-of-service attacks that are oriented against the tertiary control, such as economic dispatch, the attack on the secondary control presented here can be more severe, as it disrupts the basic functionality of the MG

Automatic power sharing modification of P/V droop controllers in low-voltage resistive microgrids

Microgrids are receiving an increasing interest to integrate the growing share of distributed generation (DG) units in the electrical network. For the islanded operation of the microgrid, several control strategies for the primary control have been developed to ensure a stable microgrid operation. In lowvoltage microgrids, active power/voltage (P/V ) droop controllers are gaining attention as they take into account the resistive nature of the network lines and the lack of directly-coupled rotating inertia. However, a problem often cited with these droop controllers is that the grid voltage is not a global parameter. This can influence the power sharing between different units. In this paper, it is investigated whether this is actually a disadvantage of the control strategy. It is shown that with P/V droop control, the DG units that are located electrically far from the load centres automatically deliver a lower share of the power. This automatic power sharing modification can lead to decreased line losses, thus, an overall better efficiency compared to the methods that focus on perfect power sharing. In this paper, the P/V and P/f droop control strategies are compared with respect to this power sharing modification and the line losses