Open Access

The need for innovation around the control functions of inverters is great. PV inverters were initially expected to be passive followers of the grid and to disconnect as soon as abnormal conditions happened. Since future power systems will be dominated by generation and storage resources interfaced through inverters these converters must move from following to forming and sustaining the grid. As “digital natives” PV inverters can also play an important role in the digitalisation of distribution networks. In this short review we identified a large potential to make the PV inverter the smart local hub in a distributed energy system. At the micro level, costs and coordination can be improved with bidirectional inverters between the AC grid and PV production, stationary storage, car chargers and DC loads. At the macro level the distributed nature of PV generation means that the same devices will support both to the local distribution network and to the global stability of the grid. Much success has been obtained in the former. The later remains a challenge, in particular in terms of scaling. Yet there is some urgency in researching and demonstrating such solutions. And while digitalisation offers promise in all control aspects it also raises significant cybersecurity concerns.

Further development on globally convergent algorithms for solution of stationary network problems is presented. The algorithms make use of global non-degeneracy of Jacobi matrix of the system, composed of Kirchhoff's flow conservation conditions and transport element equations. This property is achieved under certain monotonicity conditions on element equations and guarantees an existence of a unique solution of the problem as well as convergence to this solution from an arbitrary starting point. In application to gas transport networks, these algorithms are supported by a proper modeling of gas compressors, based on individually calibrated physical characteristics. This paper extends the modeling of compressors by hierarchical methods of topological reduction, combining the working diagrams for parallel and sequential connections of compressors. Estimations are also made for application of topological reduction methods beyond the compressor stations in generic network problems. Efficiency of the methods is tested by numerical experiments on realistic networks.

Failure prognostic builds up on constant data acquisition and processing and fault diagnosis and is an essential part of predictive maintenance of smart manufacturing systems enabling condition based maintenance, optimised use of plant equipment, improved uptime and yield and to prevent safety problems. Given known control inputs into a plant and real sensor outputs or simulated measurements, the model-based part of the proposed hybrid method provides numerical values of unknown parameter degradation functions at sampling time points by the evaluation of equations that have been derived offline from a bicausal diagnostic bond graph. These numerical values are computed concurrently to the constant monitoring of a system and are stored in a buffer of fixed length. The data-driven part of the method provides a sequence of remaining useful life estimates by repeated projection of the parameter degradation into the future based on the use of values in a sliding time window. Existing software can be used to determine the best fitting function and can account for its random parameters. The continuous parameter estimation and their projection into the future can be performed in parallel for multiple isolated simultaneous parametric faults on a multicore, multiprocessor computer. The proposed hybrid bond graph model-based, data-driven method is verified by an offline simulation case study of a typical power electronic circuit. It can be used to implement embedded systems that enable cooperating machines in smart manufacturing to perform prognostic themselves.

Since we are living in a three-dimensional world, an adequate description of our environment for many applications includes the relative position and motion of the different objects in a scene. Nature has satisfied this need for spatial perception by providing most animals with at least two eyes. This stereo vision ability is the basis that allows the brain to calculate qualitative depth information of the observed scene. Another important parameter in the complex human depth perception is our experience and memory. Although it is far more difficult, a human being is even able to recognize depth information without stereo vision. For example, we can qualitatively deduce the 3D scene from most photos, assuming that the photos contain known objects [COR]. The acquisition, storage, processing and comparison of such a huge amount of information requires enormous computational power - with which nature fortunately provides us. Therefore, for a technical implementation, one should resort to other simpler measurement principles. Additionally, the qualitative distance estimates of such knowledge-based passive vision systems can be replaced by accurate range measurements.