Please join us, when Kostya Turitsyn, Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gives a inspiring talk on "Design, Stability, and Control of Ad-hoc Microgrids".
Wednesday, June 21 at 11.00 am
Everyone is very welcome to attend / Please feel free to disseminate this to anyone that might be interested.
Abstract:
Microgrids are a promising and viable solution for integrating the distributed generation resources in future power systems. In developed countries, they allow for unprecedented levels of system resilience even under extreme conditions. While in developing countries, microgrids is the only realistic option for delivering power to about 1 billion of people living in non-electrified regions in the coming decades. Similar to large-scale power systems, microgrids are prone to a range of instability mechanisms and are naturally fragile with respect to disturbances. However, existing planning and operation practices employed in large scale transmission grids usually cannot be downscaled to small low-voltage microgrids.
This talk will discuss the concept of ad-hoc microgrids that allow for arbitrary interconnection and switching with guaranteed stability. Although the problem of microgrid stability and control has received a lot of attention in the last years, vast majority of existing works assumed that the network configuration is given and fixed. Moreover, only few works have accounted for electromagnetic delays that will be shown to play a critical role in the context of stability. The talk will introduce a new mathematical framework for characterization and certification of stability in an ad-hoc setting and derive the formal design constraints for both DC and AC networks. In the context of low-voltage DC network, the corresponding derivations will employ the Brayton-Moser potential theory and result in simple conditions on load capacitances that guarantee both small-signal and transient stability. Whereas for AC microgrids, the singular perturbation analysis will be used to derive simple relations for the droop coefficient of neighboring networks. The talk will conclude with a brief discussion of key open problems and challenges.
Bio:
Konstantin (Kostya) Turitsyn received his Ph.D. degree in physics from Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Moscow, in 2007. Currently, he holds an Associate Professor position in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. Before joining MIT, he was Kadanoff-Rice fellow in University of Chicago and Oppenheimer fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His research interests encompass a broad range of problems related to development of novel mathematical tools for analysis of large-scale nonlinear and stochastic systems. These tools have been applied to problems arising in different domains, most importantly in the fields of statistical physics, optics, fluid mechanics and more recently power systems.