I would like to take the opportunity and thank the staff of the AERI, especially to Mihai Ciobotaru for their help and guidance during my stay. It was an experience of a lifetime to be there and work with them. The collaboration was of high value and I hope for the future that it will continue.
The Institute
The vision of the energy research institute is to become an internationally recognized model of collaborative interaction between academia, industry, business and community to transform thinking and provide long-term solutions for the move towards a truly sustainable energy infrastructure.
Moreover, the focus of the AERI is directed towards key areas such as renewable and sustainable energy systems, the creation of smart electricity grids. In order to achieve these goals, they have built the biggest RTDS laboratory in the world which is at a university.
Furthermore, to test the integration of the electrical cars and their batteries into the power grid they just recently purchased a Tesla and 2 BMW I3 cars.
Development
My PhD is about control of the grid current, hence this can be incorporated into the goals of the institute, resulting in a mutual interest between each other’s projects. In order to be able, to control the grid current effectively, a reliable, fast and cheap control system has to be used.
For this purpose, during my stay at UNSW I have developed a control system (among other things) suitable, for controlling 4 converters connected in parallel, using a state-of-the-art MCU. This MCU enables us to use complex modulation techniques and use fast sampling. The developed board will be used by both universities and it will be used for further collaborations between the universities.