Topic: Micro Grid Cooperative Distributed Energy Management and Battery SoC/SoH/SoF Estimation
Speaker: Dr. Mo-Yuen Chow, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NC State University
Description: This lecture will provide a brief overview of the energy sector revolution from the legacy power grid, through micro/smart grids to smarter grids, including the motivations (Why?), challenges (What?) and enabling technologies (How?) of each stage in this inevitable transition. We will highlight two technologies developed in ADAC (Advanced Diagnosis, Automation and Control) Lab: 1) Cooperative distributed energy management, 2) From electrochemical to Thevenin-circuit battery modeling and State of Charge/State of Health/State of Function (SoC/SoH/SoF) estimation, to illustrate some current efforts in making micro/smart grids smarter.
Topic: Embedded systems for intelligent spaces
Speaker: Dr. Juan José Rodríguez Andina, Department of Electronic Technology, University of Vigo
Description: After briefly describing different implementation options for embedded systems, the talk analyzes issues related to the design of intelligent sensing solutions for the ADAC/DTE iSpace environment using Field Programmable System-on-Chip platforms.
Topic: Power Electronics and Controls for Renewable Energy Systems
Speaker: Dr. Iqbal Husain, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NC State University
Description: Distributed energy resource systems (DERS) based on renewables such as wind turbines and photovoltaics have experienced rapid growth over the past decade. The DERS offer clean technologies that can reduce the major environmental impact of present electricity sources. However, renewables present their own challenges due to their variability and grid interconnection control requirements. This short course will focus on the renewable energy systems, efficient power electronic conversion technologies and their controls, and grid converter synchronization. Present trends in wide band gap power semiconductor device applications will also be reviewed.
Topic: Building flexible mobile robot applications
Speaker: Dr. Joaquín López Fernández, Department of Engineering Systems and Automation, University of Vigo
Description: The complexity of robot software systems calls for the use of a well-conceived architecture together with programming tools to support it. In this talk we will first identify some of the issues that need to be solved in all these autonomous mobile robot applications. Next we will talk about some of the most popular solutions proposed on the literature for each of these issues and the way we apply them within the control architecture. One common feature of robot architectures is the modular decomposition of systems into simpler and largely independent components. These components implement primitive actions and report events about their state. In order to create flexible applications, tasks must be easily monitored and modified. We will show the advantage of using some specific tool to program, monitor and coordinate the activity (tasks) of these middleware modules. Finally we will see how this framework is applied on three different applications.
Topic: Reliable and Secure Communications in Smart Grids
Speaker: Dr. Wenye Wang, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NC State University
Description: Smart Grids, which is an integrated complex system of both power grids and information technologies, present many unique and challenging issues to reliable data delivery. This seminar will provide an overview of the communication and security requirements in Smart Grids, as well as typical networking solutions and their impacts. The seminar will be composed of three parts: 1) the glance of communication architecture of Smart Grids; 2) the SCADA protocol and their implementations and measurements; 3) the cyber threats and use cases.
Topic: Laser processing of Group IV semiconductors for microelectronics and photonics
Speaker: Dr. Stefano Chiussi, Department of Applied Physics, University of Vigo
Description: Fabrication of flexible Thin Film Solar Cells and microelectronic devices, as well as of Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) using CMOS compatible indirect or direct bandgap Group-IV heterostructures is of increasing concern from scientific, technological, and economic point of view. Growth of pure group IV elements or alloys, such as the Silicon-Germanium-Tin (SiGeSn) binaries and ternaries through CMOS compatible techniques is therefore of particular interest. This lecture will give a brief overview on basic properties and applications of group IV elements, and show some issues as well as challenges related to the production of high quality material. We will focus on the benefits of using Excimer laser radiation for growing, alloying and patterning Group IV materials through low thermal budget and rapid thermal processing techniques. Some essential characterization techniques will be summarized, to understand our examples for thin film growth on temperature sensible substrates such as polymers, local annealing of epitaxial heterostructures, and formation of new advanced Group IV alloys, such as SiGeSn.
Topic: Modelling of microfluidic devices for energy harvesting
Speaker: Dr. Elena B. Martin, Department of Mechanical, Thermal and Fluids Engineering, University of Vigo
Description: At the beginning of the talk a brief revision on scaling and modelling of microfluidic devices will be made, to focus later on time dependent phenomena and its use to enhance movement and heat transfer in microdevices.
Topic: Energy-Efficient Data Centers
Speaker: Dr. Greg Byrd, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NC State University
Description: Modern data centers typically consist of large collections of rack-mounted servers in a carefully-controlled environment. Energy and power are significant concerns for such environments, both for the computational requirements and the need to cool the equipment. We will discuss a variety of measures employed to improve the energy efficiency of large data centers in hardware (both processors and systems), software, and power management systems.
