A microgrid is a subnetwork of power system that consists of a group of distributed energy sources and loads. It is designed to integrate distributed generation, loads, energy storage devices, converters, and monitoring and protection devices. Generally, a successful microgrid could run both in island mode (off-grid) and in grid-connected mode (on-grid), being able to convert between two modes at any time. With continuous development of the power system, distributed renewable generation unit accounts for an increasing proportion, since microgrid could effectively connect these generation units to the main grid, thereby improving the energy efficiency and the energy structure. Microgrid is increasingly playing an important role in the power system. This thesis focuses on reducing the cost of microgrids through economic operation, including both static and dynamic economic operations. Three cases are tested based on these two methods. Also, each case will include four situations including one without ESS and three situations with 2MWh ESS, 3MWh ESS, 4MWh ESS, respectively.

Satellite power systems can be understood as islanded dc microgrids supplied by specialized and coordinated solar cell arrays augmented by electrochemical battery systems to handle high-power loads and periods of eclipse. The periodic availability of power, the limited capacity of batteries, and the dependence of all mission service on power consumption create a unique situation in which temporal power and energy scarcity exist. A multi-period model of an orbital satellite power system’s performance over a mission’s duration can be constructed. A modular power system architecture is used to characterize the system’s constraints. Using mathematical programming, an optimization problem can be posed such that the optimal power and energy ratings for the power system are determined for any load schedule imposed by a given mission’s requirements. The optimal energy trajectory of the electrical power system over a mission’s duration is also determined when the mathematical programming problem is solved. A generic set of mission requirements is identified to test this approach, but the objective function of the resulting optimization problem can be modified to return different results. These results can provide a clear illustration of the trade-offs that designers of such power systems consider in the design process.

Considering the significant investment of higher education made by students and their families, graduating in a timely manner is of the utmost importance. Delay attributed to drop out or the retaking of a course adds cost and negatively affects a student’s academic progression. Considering this, it becomes paramount for institutions to focus on student success in relation to term scheduling. Often overlooked, complexity of a course schedule may be one of the most important factors in whether or not a student successfully completes his or her degree. More often than not students entering an institution as a first time full time (FSFT) freshman follow the advised and published schedule given by administrators. Providing the optimal schedule that gives the student the highest probability of success is critical. In efforts to create this optimal schedule, this thesis introduces a novel optimization algorithm with the objective to separate courses which when taken together hurt students’ pass rates. Inversely, we combine synergistic relationships that improve a students probability for success when the courses are taken in the same semester. Using actual student data at the University of Kentucky, we categorically find these positive and negative combinations by analyzing recorded pass rates. Using Julia language on top of the Gurobi solver, we solve for the optimal degree plan of a student in the electrical engineering program using a linear and non-linear multi-objective optimization. A user interface is created for administrators to optimize their curricula at main.optimizeplans.com.

Currently organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite solar cells (PSCs) is one kind of promising photovoltaic technology due to low production cost, easy fabrication method and high power conversion efficiency. Charge transport layers are found to be critical for device performance and stability. A traditional electron transport layer (ETL), such as TiO2 (Titanium dioxide), is not very efficient for charge extraction at the interface. Compared with TiO2, SnO2 (Tin (IV) Oxide) possesses several advantages such as higher mobility and better energy level alignment. In addition, PSCs with planar structure can be processed at lower temperature compared to PSCs with other structures. In this thesis, planar-structure perovskite solar cells with SnO2 as the electron transport layer are fabricated. The one-step spin-coating method is employed for the fabrication. Several issues are studied such as annealing the samples in ambient air or glovebox, different concentration of solution used for the samples, the impact of using filter for solutions on samples. Finally, a reproducible fabrication procedure for planer-structure perovskite solar cells with an average power conversion efficiency of 16.8%, and a maximum power conversion efficiency of 18.1% is provided.

LARs (Line Associative Registers) are very wide tagged registers, used for both register-wide SWAR (SIMD Within a Register )operations and scalar operations on arbitrary fields. LARs include a large data field, type tags, source addresses, and a dirty bit, which allow them to not only replace both caches and registers in the conventional memory hierarchy, but improve on both their functions. This thesis details a LAR-based architecture, and describes the design of a compiler which can generate code for a LAR-based design. In particular, type conversion, alignment, and register allocation are discussed in detail.

As renewable energy plays an increasingly important role in the power system, the addition of PV systems to the distribution network has become a major trend in the current power system development. However, if a PV system with excessive capacity is added to the distribution network, voltage problems may occur in the system. Hence, it is important to determine the capacity of the PV system that can be added at the distribution system. The thesis aims to identify the major factors that affect the PV hosting capacity of distribution systems. The thesis studies various scenarios for the IEEE-123 test network PV system and evaluates the PV hosting capacity of the distribution system based on simulation tools including Matlab and Opendss software.

With the emergence of quantum physics and computer science in the 20th century, a new era was born which can solve very difficult problems in a much faster rate or problems that classical computing just can't solve. In the 21st century, quantum computing needs to be used to solve tough problems in engineering, business, medical, and other fields that required results not today but yesterday. To make this dream come true, engineers in the semiconductor industry need to make the quantum circuits a reality. To realize quantum circuits and make them scalable, they need to be fault tolerant, therefore Clifford+T gates need to be implemented into those circuits. But the main issue is that in the Clifford+T gate set, T gates are expensive to implement. Carry Look-Ahead addition circuits have caught the interest of researchers because the number of gate layers encountered by a given qubit in the circuit (or the circuit's depth) is logarithmic in terms of the input size n. Therefore, this thesis focuses on optimizing previous designs of out-of-place and in-place Carry Look-Ahead Adders to decrease the T-count, sum of all T and T Hermitian transpose gates in a quantum circuit.

The evolving concept of Ephemeral State Processing (ESP) is overviewed. ESP allows development of new scalable end-to-end network user services. An evolving macro-level language is being developed to support ESP at the network node level. Three approaches for implementing ESP services at network routers can be considered. One approach is to use the existing processing capability within commercially available network routers. Another approach is to add a small scale existing ASIC based general-purpose processor to an existing network router. This thesis research concentrates on a third approach of developing a special-purpose programmable Ephemeral State Processor (ESPR) Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and implementing microarchitecture for deployment within each ESP-capable node to implement ESP service within that node. A unique architectural characteristic of the ESPR is its scalable and temporal Ephemeral State Store (ESS) associative memory, required by the ESP service for storage/retrieval of bounded (short) lifetime ephemeral (tag, value) pairs of application data. The ESPR will be implemented to Programmable Logic Device (PLD) technology within a network node. This offers advantages of reconfigurability, in-field upgrade capability and supports the evolving growth of ESP services. Correct functional and performance operation of the presented ESPR microarchitecture is validated via Hardware Description Language (HDL) post-implementation (virtual prototype) simulation testing. Suggestions of future research related to improving the performance of the ESPR rnicroarchitecture and experimental deployment of ESP are discussed.

Fault location reveals the exact information needed for utility crews to timely and promptly perform maintenance and system restoration. Therefore, accurate fault location is a key function in reducing outage time and enhancing power system reliability. Modern power systems are witnessing a trend of integrating more distributed generations (DG) into the grid. DG power outputs may be intermittent and can no longer be treated as constants in fault location method development. DG modeling is also difficult for fault location purpose. Moreover, most existing fault location methods are not applicable to simultaneous faults. To solve the challenges, this dissertation proposes three impedance-based fault location algorithms to pinpoint simultaneous faults for power transmission systems and distribution systems with high penetration of DGs. The proposed fault location algorithms utilize the voltage and/or current phasors that are captured by phasor measurement units. Bus impedance matrix technique is harnessed to establish the relationship between the measurements and unknown simultaneous fault locations. The distinct features of the proposed algorithms are that no fault types and fault resistances are needed to determine the fault locations. In particular, Type I and Type III algorithms do not need the information of source impedances and prefault measurements to locate the faults. Moreover, the effects of shunt capacitance are fully considered to improve fault location accuracy. The proposed algorithms for distribution systems are validated by evaluation studies using Matlab and Simulink SimPowerSystems on a 21 bus distribution system and the modified IEEE 34 node test system. Type II fault location algorithm for transmission systems is applicable to untransposed lines and is validated by simulation studies using EMTP on a 27 bus transmission system. Fault area identification method is proposed to reduce the number of line segments to be examined for fault location. In addition, an optimal fault location method that can identify possible bad measurement is proposed for enhanced fault location estimate. Evaluation studies show that the optimal fault location method is accurate and effective. The proposed algorithms can be integrated into the existing energy management system for enhanced fault management capability for power systems.

Structured Light Illumination is a widely used 3D shape measurement technique in non-contact surface scanning. Multi-pattern based Structured Light Illumination methods reconstruct 3-D surface with high accuracy, but are sensitive to object motion during the pattern projection and the speed of scanning process is relatively long. To reduce this sensitivity, single pattern techniques are developed to achieve a high speed scanning process, such as Composite Pattern (CP) and Modified Composite Pattern (MCP) technique. However, most of single patter techniques have a significant banding artifact and sacrifice the accuracy. We focus on developing SLI techniques can achieve both high speed, high accuracy and have the tolerance to the relative motion. We first present a novel Two-Pattern Full Lateral Resolution (2PFLR) SLI method utilizing an MCP pattern for non-ambiguous phase followed by a single sinusoidal pattern for high accuracy. The surface phase modulates the single sinusoidal pattern which is demodulated using a Quadrature demodulation technique and then unwrapped by the MCP phase result. A single sinusoidal pattern reconstruction inherently has banding error. To effective de-band the surface, we propose Projector Space De-banding algorithm (PSDb). We use projector space because the band error is aligned with the projector coordinates allowing more accurate estimation of the banding error. 2PFLR system only allows the relative motion within the FOV of the scanner, to extend the application of the SLI, we present the research on Relative Motion 3-D scanner which utilize a single pattern technique. The pattern in RM3D system is designed based on MCP but has white space area to capture the surface texture, and a constellation correlation filter method is used to estimate the scanner's trajectory and then align the 3-D surface reconstructed by each frame to a point cloud of the whole object surface.