Research & Scholarly Activities
My research is toward establishment of Situation-Aware, Self-Healing, Inclusive Electric Cyber-Physical Systems
The topic integrates my achievements and expertise toward a futuristic electric system and paves the way for my future research endeavors. This line of research relies on real-time analysis of numerous high-sampling streams of data to discover the present system’s situation. It consists of running-statistics and artificial data-analytics methods. This part of the topic enables the cyber part to be aware of the volatile nature of renewable-based smart grids. For securing the physical part, advanced protective relays must be devised and optimally coordinated with the rest of the system. The system topology, generation and reserve resources, and demand always change from time to time. Contingencies make the system unpredictable, to a large extent, and at the same time, new technologies are continually introduced which demand their own particular needs (e.g., EVs). Thus, plug-and-play ability and large-scalability of micro-grids are of great interest. This necessitates the use of control and management systems that enhance the system flexibility, reliability, and resilience against cyber-attacks, natural disasters, and system failures. In response to this requirement, fully distributed control methods will be employed to fulfill the inclusiveness of the electric system.
✯ Protection of IBR-based Grids
The integration of Inverter-Based Resources (IBRs) results in protection issues. Therefore, advanced protection methods should be devised to enhance system functionality. Having been in close contact with and supported by a local utility company, I handled a research project that resulted in smart protection solutions for real grids. In this regard, real time-current characteristic (TCC) curves; e.g., IEEE, IEC, and GE curves; of relays and auto-reclosers were optimally coordinated using artificial intelligence (AI) to resolve the protection deficiencies. The results of the project are currently in use in real distribution systems.
The below picture show the main difference between fault currents in conventionally electro-mechanically supplied systems and heavily IBR-based grids.
✯ Electro-Magnetic Transients (EMT)
In light of growing integration of IBRs to the grids, Phasor-based analysis is not going to be reliable in all aspects and then, EMT-type analysis will be the solution. However, this type of analysis is computationally intensive, and therefore, new numerical solvers as well as component models should be designed to pace up the stiff calculations and increase the accuracy. In particular, I am focused on developing fully parallel implicit numerical DE solvers for large-scale electric grids.
One of my team's latest achievements in parallel processing of the large grids in EMT-type is show below.
✯ Digital Twins
Digital replicas of hardware remotely or locally receiving streams of data from the components. Sophisticated models of the component should be solved in real-time with high precision to discover the internal states of the component using the limited and mostly low-sampling rate data. The high-level structure of DTs is shown.