Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons^™

Deep Learning Methods For Fingerprint-Based Indoor And Outdoor Positioning, Fahad Alhomayani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Outdoor positioning systems based on the Global Navigation Satellite System have several shortcomings that have deemed their use for indoor positioning impractical. Location fingerprinting, which utilizes machine learning, has emerged as a viable method and solution for indoor positioning due to its simple concept and accurate performance. In the past, shallow learning algorithms were traditionally used in location fingerprinting. Recently, the research community started utilizing deep learning methods for fingerprinting after witnessing the great success and superiority these methods have over traditional/shallow machine learning algorithms. The contribution of this dissertation is fourfold:

First, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based method for …

Optimal Sizing And Operation Of A Pumped Thermal Energy Storage System, Matthew Perez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Current trends in the modern grid are leading to the integration of energy storage technologies (ESSs), such as pumped thermal energy storage to help incorporate more variable renewable energy sources into the grid. This paper analyzes the operation of a pumped thermal energy storage (PTES) system under the grid services of energy arbitrage, regulation services, spinning and non-spinning reserve, resource adequacy, and a combination of them all. Each revenue stream is setup into an optimization problem and solved to find which revenue generating technique would generate the most revenue. The combined revenue stream was found to produce the most revenue …

Thermal Performance Of Algan/Gan Based Power Switching Devices For Transformerless Inverters, Mahesh B. Manandhar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Wide Bandgap (WBG) semiconductors like Silicon Carbide (SiC), Gallium Nitride (GaN) and Aluminum Gallium Nitride (AlGaN) have superior material properties as compared to Silicon (Si) like higher electrical breakdown voltages and bandgap energies as well as lower leakage currents as compared to Si which make them ideal to operate at higher voltage with lower thermal losses. These properties make WBG materials ideal for power devices like Vertical Double-diffused Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (VDMOSFETs). The use of digital prototyping through computer simulation increases the speed and flexibility of the design iterations while reducing the cost and time required for …

Wind Turbine Parameter Calibration Using Deep Learning Approaches, Rebecca Mccubbin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The inertia and damping coefficients are critical to understanding the workings of a wind turbine, especially when it is in a transient state. However, many manufacturers do not provide this information about their turbines, requiring people to estimate these values themselves. This research seeks to design a multilayer perceptron (MLP) that can accurately predict the inertia and damping coefficients using the power data from a turbine during a transient state. To do this, a model of a wind turbine was built in Matlab, and a simulation of a three-phase fault was used to collect realistic fault data to input into …

Characterization, Analysis, And Application Of Wbg Power Devices For Future Power Conversion Systems, Ali Mahmoud Salman Al-Bayati

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Semiconductor power devices are the most momentous constituents of any power converter system. Fast switching, compactness, high performance and efficiency, and high temperature operation are the exacting challenges experienced by conventional silicon (Si) power device based power converters in many applications. In this dissertation, the wide bandgap (WBG) power devices are studied and used to transcend the limitations imposed by the Si power devices. It mainly focuses on characterization and analysis of the behavior of WBG power devices as well as design and development of efficient, high performance, and reliable dc–dc power converters based on WBG technology. First, using computer …

Nyku: A Social Robot For Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders, Dan Stephan Stoianovici

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The continued growth of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) around the world has spurred a growth in new therapeutic methods to increase the positive outcomes of an ASD diagnosis. It has been agreed that the early detection and intervention of ASD disorders leads to greatly increased positive outcomes for individuals living with the disorders. Among these new therapeutic methods, Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has become a hot area of study. Recent works have shown that high functioning ASD children have an affinity for interacting with robots versus humans. It is proposed that this is due to a less complex set of communication …

Microgrid-Enabled Reactive Power Support To Enhance Grid Economics, Sarhan Hasan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Reactive power plays an essential role in voltage control and stability in electric power systems. Various Volt/VAR techniques are utilized in electric power systems to maintain the voltage profile within defined acceptable limits and accordingly provide reliability and stability. Reactive power has been commonly generated through large-scale synchronous generators or distributed capacitor banks to provide proper transmission and distribution level system management, however, reactive power can be further used as an effective means to reduce total system operation cost. In this dissertation, an optimal reactive power model is proposed to determine the optimal nodal reactive powers that result in the …

Deep Reinforcement Learning For The Optimization Of Building Energy Control And Management, Jun Hao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Most of the current game-theoretic demand-side management methods focus primarily on the scheduling of home appliances, and the related numerical experiments are analyzed under various scenarios to achieve the corresponding Nash-equilibrium (NE) and optimal results. However, not much work is conducted for academic or commercial buildings. The methods for optimizing academic-buildings are distinct from the optimal methods for home appliances. In my study, we address a novel methodology to control the operation of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system (HVAC).

We assume that each building in our campus is equipped with smart meter and communication system which is envisioned in …

Experimental Investigation Of Low-Voltage Silicon Carbide (Sic) Semiconductor Devices For Power Conversion Applications, Saleh Salem H. Alharbi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Enhancing the performance and efficiency of power converter systems requires fast-switching power devices with considerably low switching and conduction losses. Silicon (Si) semiconductor devices are the essential components in electronic converter designs, and their behaviors and switching characteristics determine the system’s overall performance and efficiency. These conventional Si devices are nearing to hit their physical and operational limits in meeting power converter requirements with respect to high temperature and large voltage conditions. However, silicon carbide (SiC) power devices enable greater converter efficiency and better power density, particularly under hard switching frequencies and high output voltages due to their outstanding material …

Real-Time Detection Of Demand Manipulation Attacks On A Power Grid, Srinidhi Madabhushi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

An increased usage in IoT devices across the globe has posed a threat to the power grid. When an attacker has access to multiple IoT devices within the same geographical location, they can possibly disrupt the power grid by regulating a botnet of high-wattage IoT devices. Based on the time and situation of the attack, an adversary needs access to a fixed number of IoT devices to synchronously switch on/off all of them, resulting in an imbalance between the supply and demand. When the frequency of the power generators drops below a threshold value, it can lead to the generators …

Power System Frequency Control And Stability Analysis With Increasing Renewable Energy Penetration Level, Weihang Yan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the ever-increasing penetration level of renewable energy generation units and the replacement of traditional synchronous generators, the issues associated with the deteriorated performance of power system frequency regulation and potential grid frequency instability become more significant. In this dissertation, the inertial control algorithms are investigated and analyzed for power electronics converter in a renewable energy generation unit. The concept and design of Virtual Synchronous Generator are comprehensively discussed, such that the small-signal stability and frequency stability of power systems with high renewable energy penetration level can be enhanced. Moreover, both nonlinear dynamic model and small-signal linearization of Virtual Synchronous …

Deep Siamese Neural Networks For Facial Expression Recognition In The Wild, Wassan Hayale

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The variation of facial images in the wild conditions due to head pose, face illumination, and occlusion can significantly affect the Facial Expression Recognition (FER) performance. Moreover, between subject variation introduced by age, gender, ethnic backgrounds, and identity can also influence the FER performance. This Ph.D. dissertation presents a novel algorithm for end-to-end facial expression recognition, valence and arousal estimation, and visual object matching based on deep Siamese Neural Networks to handle the extreme variation that exists in a facial dataset. In our main Siamese Neural Networks for facial expression recognition, the first network represents the classification framework, where we …

Aggregated Der Management In Advanced Distribution Grids, Mohsen Mahoor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Evolution of modern power systems are more distinct in distribution grids, where the growing integration of microgrids as well as distributed energy resources (DERs), including renewable energy resources, electric vehicles (EVs), and energy storage, poses new challenges and opportunities to grid management and operation. Rapid growth of distribution automation as well as equipment monitoring technologies in the distribution grids further offer new opportunities for distribution asset management. The idea of aggregated DERs is proposed as a remedy to streamline management and operation of advanced distribution grids, as discussed under three subjects in this dissertation. The first subject matter focuses on …

Experimental Evaluation Of Medium-Voltage Cascode Gallium Nitride (Gan) Devices For Bidirectional Dc–Dc Converters, Salah Salem H. Alharbi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As renewable energy sources, such as photovoltaic (PV) cells and wind turbines, are rapidly implemented in DC microgrids, energy storage systems play an increasingly significant role in ensuring uninterrupted power supply and in supporting the reliability and stability of microgrid operations. Power electronics, especially bidirectional DC–DC converters, are essential parts in distributed energy storage and alternative energy systems because of their grid synchronization, DC power management, and bidirectional power flow capabilities. While there is increasing demand for more efficient, compact, and reliable power converters in numerous applications, most existing power converters are hindered by traditional silicon (Si) based semiconductors, which …

Ultrasonic-Based Condition Assessment Of Wooden Utility Poles, Yishi Lee

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

More than 300 million utility poles shoulder the utility grid in the United States. However, the ineffectiveness of the current inspection process causes roughly a third of utility poles removed from the service deemed suitable for reuse. Due to the utterly essential role of the power infrastructure, budget shrinkage, and the structural degradation of the modern distribution grid, this Ph.D. dissertation addresses the challenges by proposing a physics-based signal analysis method with a jointly developed ultrasonic UB1000 system c to enhance the objectivity in ultrasonic-based nondestructive evaluation (NDE). The proposed methodology has been deployed commercially in the field and featured …

Impact Of Grid-Following And Grid-Forming Ders On Resilient Operation Of Holonic Grid, Ali M. Alsenan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates how different distributed energy resources (DERs) impact the resilience operation of a holonic grid. The holonic grid consists of two or more connected microgrids and /or provisional microgrids (PMGs). The type of the DER, i.e., grid-forming or grid-following, affects the operations of the holonic grid, particularly during the islanded mode. To study this emerging and timely topic, a resilience-oriented holonic grid optimal operation model is proposed. This model carefully formulates the operations of both grid-forming and grid-following DERs. A variable value of lost load (VoLL) is further employed in the proposed model to help quantify and monetize …

Developing Machine Learning Algorithms For Behavior Recognition From Deep Brain Signals, Hosein Golshan Mojdehi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative condition and movement disorder that appears with symptoms such as tremor, rigidity of muscles and slowness of movements. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an FDA-approved surgical therapy for essential tremor and PD. Despite the fact that DBS substantially alleviates the motor signs of PD, it can cause cognitive side effects and speech malfunction mainly due to the lack of adaptivity and optimality of the stimulation signal to the patients’ current state. A behavior-adapted closed-loop DBS system may reduce the side effects and power consumption by adjusting the stimulation parameters to patients’ need.

Behavior recognition …

Supervised Machine Learning Techniques For Short-Term Load Forecasting, Harish Amarasundar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Electric Load Forecasting is essential for the utility companies for energy management based on the demand. Machine Learning Algorithms has been in the forefront for prediction algorithms. This Thesis is mainly aimed to provide utility companies with a better insight about the wide range of Techniques available to forecast the load demands based on different scenarios. Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms were used to come up with the best possible solution for Short-Term Electric Load forecasting. The input Data set has the hourly load values, Weather data set and other details of a Day. The models were evaluated using MAPE and …

Control Strategy For A Small-Scale Microgrid Based On Battery Energy Storage System-Virtual Synchronous Generator (Bess-Vsg), Wei Gao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As one of widely deployed renewable energy resources, PV power is playing a very important role in microgrids today. It has advantages such as making the best of natural solar energy and being friendly to our environment. In this thesis, solar PV based microgrid is studied using modeling and simulation. Microgrid can run in either grid-connected-mode or islanded-mode. However, there are also some disadvantages for solar power. For solar panel, its output is influenced by weather conditions such as illumination intensity and temperature. In addition, during the control process of grid-connected mode, it is hard to guarantee its output power …

Small-Scale Microgrid Energy Market Based On Pilt-Dao, Tianlu Gao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the installed capacities of Distributed Generations (DGs) dramatically increasing in power systems from Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) such as hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal and biomass, the operation methods of DERs tradings or transactions become more and more complicated. However, the energy market of DERs in Microgrids (MGs) is still under devolvement due to low security and transparency at present. Therefore, a small-scale microgrid energy market is proposed in this study based on Decentralized Autonomous Organization of Parallel, Integrity, Longevity, and Transparency (PILT-DAO) of the features of the blockchain. The microgrid owners can complete the transaction in the PILT-DAO market. …

Power System Resilience Enhancement Using Artificial Intelligence, Rozhin Eskandarpour

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Extreme weather events and natural disasters are the major cause of power outages in the United States. An accurate forecast of component outages and the resultant load curtailment in response to extreme events is an essential task in pre- and post-event planning, recovery and hardening of power systems. Power system resilience improvement is investigated in this work from component outage prediction to identifying the potential power outages in the system to estimating probable load curtailment due to these outages and offering methods for grid hardening. Initially, two machine learning based prediction methods are proposed to determine the potential outage of …

Solar Forecasting And Integration In Power Systems, Mohana Alanazi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Renewable energy resources are becoming critical players in the electricity generation sector, primarily due to viability in combating global warming, effectiveness in reducing pollution caused by fossil fuel based generation, and diversifying energy mix to ensure energy security and sustainability. Solar energy is one of the most common types of renewable energy that has grown rapidly over the past decade and is anticipated to grow even faster in the future. Power supply from renewable resources is forecasted to surpass other types of generation in a foreseeable future. Numerous factors, including but not limited to the dropping cost of solar technology, …

Radar Detection, Tracking And Identification For Uav Sense And Avoid Applications, Erik George Moore

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology have enabled wider access for the general public leading to more stringent flight regulations, such as the "line of sight" restriction, for hobbyists and commercial applications. Improving sensor technology for Sense And Avoid (SAA) systems is currently a major research area in the unmanned vehicle community. This thesis overviews efforts made to advance intelligent algorithms used to detect, track, and identify commercial UAV targets by enabling rapid prototyping of novel radar techniques such as micro-Doppler radar target identification or cognitive radar. To enable empirical radar signal processing evaluations, an S-Band and X-Band frequency …

Proactive Monitoring, Anomaly Detection, And Forecasting Of Solar Photovoltaic Systems Using Artificial Neural Networks, Ahmad Almadhor

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The world of energy sustainability landscape is witnessing high proliferation of smartgrids and microgrids, it has become significant to use intelligent tools to design, operate and maintain such crucial systems in our lives. Solar energy is an intermittent source and purely Photovoltaic (PV) based, or PV and storage based smartgrids require characterization and modelling of PV resources for an effective planning and effective operations. This dissertation familiarizes briefly the existing tools for design, monitoring, forecasting and operation of a solar system in smart electric grids infrastructure and proposes a unique application-based infrastructure to monitor, operate, forecast and troubleshoot a working …

A Study On Distributed Generation With A Focus On Solar Power, Shravan Kumar Tomar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Centralized generation is when electric power is produced in a large scale of tens of MWs and is located away from the end user. This kind of production is connected to a series of high-voltage transmission lines. Electricity is then delivered to the end user through a network of distribution grids. Centralized generation tend to have multiple end user with multiple user profiles.

Distributed Generation is when is produced in a small scale and is located at the site of or very close to the end user. There are many ways distributed generation can be achieved, Solar power being the …

Capturing Transmission And Distribution Connected Wind Energy Variability, Abdulaziz Alanazi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although renewable energy provides a viable solution to address ongoing challenges of the economy and the environment in modern power systems, the variable generation of this technology results in major technical challenges for system operators. This issue is becoming more severe as the penetration of renewable generation is increasing. This dissertation addresses the variability challenge of renewable energy resources in transmission and distribution levels of modern power systems.

For transmission level, this dissertation focuses on wind generation fluctuation. Three methods of reducing wind generation fluctuation are investigated from an economic perspective, including (a) dumping the wind generation, (b) using battery …

Design And Analysis Of A Non-Isolated High Gain Step-Up Cuk Converter, Yasser Almalaq

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Renewable energy sources, such as solar energy, are desired for both economic and ecological issues. These renewable energy sources are plentiful in nature and have a terrific capability for power generation. The only drawback of solar energy, which is one of the best forms of energy sources, is that the output has a low voltage and needs to be stepped up in order to be inserted into the DC grid or an inverter for AC applications. To overcome this drawback, a high gain DC-DC power converter is required in this kind of system. These power converters are needed for a …

Increasing Distribution Grid Hosting Capacity Through Wire And Non-Wire Solutions, Abdulrahman N. Almazroui

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Increased deployment of distributed generation (DG) can adversely impact the operational performance of distribution networks. This increment can potentially change network power flow and result in several operational issues such as reduced power quality, overvoltage, and ineffective protection. In order to quantify the degradation bounds of distribution operation due to increasing DG integration, the concept of hosting capacity is introduced. The aim of this thesis is to increase the DG hosting capacity in distribution network by proposing several wire and non-wire solutions. To this end, these solutions include network reconfiguration, reactive power control, and energy storage system deployment. The network …

Nonlinear Controller Design For Uavs With Time-Varying Aerodynamic Uncertainties, Michail G. Michailidis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are here and they are here to stay. Unmanned Aviation has expanded significantly in recent years and research and development in the field of navigation and control have advanced beyond expectations. UAVs are currently being used for defense programs around the world but the range of applications is expected to grow in the near future, with civilian applications such as environmental and aerial monitoring, aerial surveillance and homeland security being some representative examples. Conventional and commercially available small-scale UAVs have limited utilization and applicability to executing specific short-duration missions because of limitations in size, payload, power …

Paving The Way For Multidisciplinary Smart Campus Infrastructure: Leveraging Du's Unique Campus For The Advancement Of Smart Campus Culture, Camerron T. Mismash

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Institutions are embracing smart technologies to reap their benefits while simultaneously innovating new uses. From localized renewable energy generation to health monitoring and everything in between, academic campuses globally are paving the way for smart technology application. Eight primary categories have been identified in which institutions are applying smart technologies. Energy development is on the forefront of these smart initiatives. The University of Denver has begun its Smart Campus Initiative by implementing a revolving fund to invest in campus improvements related to the offset of carbon. By comparing how institutions are investing in smart campus initiatives and analyzing costs associated …