Esta pesquisa apresenta um estudo comparativo de inversores monofásicos conectados à rede (sem transformador de acoplamento), empregando geradores fotovoltaicos. Inicialmente é destacada a crescente demanda mundial por energia elétrica e o crescimento da utilização de geração através de fontes renováveis, impulsionando o desenvolvimento dessas tecnologias. Também é apresentado um resumo sobre a geração de energia elétrica fotovoltaica descentralizada, incluindo os principais tipos de sistemas e a sua conexão à rede de distribuição da concessionária. Em busca da redução do custo da energia elétrica produzida com geradores fotovoltaicos, a eliminação do transformador de baixa frequência que conecta o inversor à rede, foi apresentada como uma alternativa interessante. Porém associada à conexão direta do inversor podem surgir correntes de fuga devido à existência de capacitâncias parasitas entre as células fotovoltaicas do painel e o potencial de terra do sistema gerador-rede. Para evitar esses problemas várias modificações no circuito eletrônico dos inversores têm sido propostas visando eliminar variações na tensão de modo comum destes. Esse trabalho busca avaliar algumas destas topologias visando definir parâmetros de desempenho que possam servir como base para a escolha de uma topologia em detrimento as demais para um conjunto de especificações tais como a potência instalada do gerador ou a amplitude da tensão da rede, dentre outros. / This research presents a comparative study of single-phase transformerless grid connected inverters, employing photovoltaic generators. Initially is highlighted the increasing worldwide demand for electricity and the growth of the use of renewable sources, driving the development of these technologies. It is also presented an overview of the photovoltaic decentralized power generation, including the major types of systems and their connection to the utility grid. In order to reduce the electricity cost of photovoltaic generation, the elimination of low frequency transformer that connects the inverter to the grid, was presented as an interesting alternative. But associated with the direct inverter connection, leakage currents may arise due to the existence of parasitic capacitances between the panel photovoltaic cell and the system ground. To avoid these problems, several modifications in the electronic circuit of the inverter have been proposed to eliminate variations in the inverter common mode voltage. This research evaluates some of these topologies in order to define performance parameters that can serve as the basis for choosing a topology over the other for a set of specifications such as the installed power or the amplitude of grid voltage, among others.

The Department of Electrical Engineering in fulfilment of the requirements for the Magister Technologiae in Electrical Engineering at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology November 2013 / Pole mounted transformers (PMT) in rural areas present an opportunity for local utilities to do current monitoring on these systems. These transformers are exposed to abnormal amounts of stress due to the vast power demand in these areas. The aim of this study is to develop a more cost-effective condition monitoring system. Transformer current monitoring can be a dangerous practice if not done by suitably trained utility electricians. Hence this study is partly aimed at the elimination of hazardous working environments associated with manual electrical measurements. An investigation to determine a safe and cost-effective way to obtain the electrical measurements required from PMTs is undertaken. Although current measurements can be done with a current clamp-on meter, these measurements still take place at the phases of the transformer and are unsafe. The possibility of implementing wireless data gathering on current clamp-on meters is therefore investigated. This is made possible by a wireless sensor node (WSN) which gathers information and transmits it wirelessly to a WSN base station. This wireless solution is battery powered, necessitating battery replacements, therefore leading to the investigation of magnetic fields, magnetic materials and magnetic induction. A current clamp able to generate a high voltage (HV) output with minimal magnetic field strength is developed. The magnetic fields produced by the transformer’s phase cables are used to generate an alternating voltage. With the help of a microcontroller and an energy harvesting circuit, this voltage is converted and used to charge supercapacitors. The magnetic fields are also used to determine the current flow in the transformer phase cables when the device is not in energy harvesting mode. The device will then undergo comprehensive laboratory testing to determine its accuracy and durability, and is then used to do ‘real life’ current measurements, the results of which are compared against an off-the-shelf current monitoring device.

M.Ing. (Electrical and Electronic Engineering) / The possibilities and technology of converters with an alternating voltage link are investigated for high specific power conversion at high frequencies. With a view to the functional description of these power converters, s i muLat i on techniques are considered for both system and circuit analysis. A thorough investigation is made into the design of high frequency power transformers, which play an important role in this class of power circuits. This includes a theoretical analysis in conjunction with the 'practical implementation of a design procedure for minimal eddy current losses in the windings as well as experimental work on losses in ferrite cores. For the remainder of the study, attention is focussed on the two pulse inverter which is responsible for the generation of the alternating voltage in the high frequency link. The suitability of bipolar and field effect transistors for power switching, is critically examined and a voltage compensation on the bipolar Darlington, which reduces on-state losses, yielded good results upon application. A study on the feasibility of non-dissipative snubber techniques on the centre tapped inverter is presented, thus supplying a practical way of reducing switching losses without affecting the efficiency of the system. An additional, yet simple, network is added to the snubber circuits of the two pulse inverter which is operational during low load conditions.' in order also to have low switching losses under these circumstances. Finally a 50 k~v, 10 kHz centre tapped inverter was developed and built.

M.Ing. (Electrical and Electronic Engineering) / Long transmission lines in power system require high line loading in order to lower voltage limits due to line losses. For relatively long lines, line charging is high and thus higher voltage limits reached at low loading. It follows then that it is a challenge to maintaining the voltages between the acceptable limits for relatively long lines. This dissertation highlights the problems experienced when load varying from very low to very high is supplied by very long parallel lines of different impedance characteristic. When the load is extremely high, there are low voltages experienced which are solved by use of shunt capacitors and/or adding more lines. When the load is extremely low, there are high voltages experienced which are solved by use of shunt reactors and/or switching some of the lines off. The type of solutions to this two loading extremes as indicated above, can be problematic, in that; new lines requires servitudes which can take too long, shunt capacitors and reactors in this type of the network is not desirable since the introduction of too many of these devices have maintenance implications and they would require continuous switching to maintain acceptable voltages, resulting in complicated operation of the network. This research proposes the use of a phase shifting transformer located on one of two parallel corridors supplying power to a load located remotely from the rest of the system. The transformer is able to rearrange the active power flows to vary loadings of the corridors and the improvements in voltage regulation can be realised during both low and high load conditions.

No description available.

Large capacity high voltage power transformers are one of the most expensive items of equipment in an electrical power network. Power utilities can ill-afford breakdown of transformers, especially, in a deregulated scenario. The consequences of such a failure are well known. Under these circumstances, utilities have figured-out that condition-based monitoring and diagnosis is worth pursuing, in spite of increased expenditure. Thus, monitoring and diagnosis is an integral part of operation and maintenance. Mechanical forces generated during short-circuits is the main cause leading to displacement/deformation of windings. Frequency response measurements have attained worldwide acceptance as a highly sensitive monitoring tool for detecting occurrence of such events. This is evident from the fact that customized commercial equipment are available (popularly called FRA or SFRA instruments), and with recent introduction of an IEEE draft trial-use guide for application and interpretation of frequency response analysis. Once a damage is detected, the next task is to identify its location along the winding and, if possible, determine its extent of severity. Understandably, these two tasks are best achieved, without disassembling the transformer and should ideally be based on off-line and on-site terminal measurements. In this regard, literature analysis reveals that recent research efforts have successfully demonstrated possibilities of using frequency response data for localization of discrete change in windings. This is indeed noteworthy, in spite of one major drawback. This pertains to excessive computing time needed to synthesize large-sized ladder-network, which automatically limits its practical use. Keeping these issues in mind, a research was initiated to find alternatives. The primary objective of this thesis is to examine the use of- • Complexnetwork-function-lociforlocalizationofadiscretechangeinasingle,isolatedtransformerwinding,basedonterminalmeasurements It goes without saying that the proposed method should be non-invasive, simple, time-efficient and overcome drawbacks in the earlier approach. A brief summary of the proposed method follows- This thesis presents a different approach to tackle the problem of localization of winding deformation in a transformer. Within the context of this thesis, winding deformation means, a discrete and specific change imposed at a particular position on the winding. The proposed method is based on the principle of pre-computing and plotting the complex network-function-loci (e.g. driving-point-impedance) at a selected frequency, for a meaningful range of values for each element (increasing and decreasing) of the ladder network. This loci diagram is called the nomogram. After introducing a discrete change (to simulate a deformation), the driving-point-impedance (amplitude and phase) is measured again .By plotting this single measurement on the nomogram, it is straightforward to estimate the location and identify the extent of change. In contrast to the earlier approach (wherein the entire ladder-network had to be synthesized for every new measurement), the proposed method overcomes the drawbacks, is non-iterative and yields reasonably accurate localization. Experimental results on a model coil and two actual transformer windings (continuous-disc and interleaved-disc) were encouraging and demonstrate its potential. Further details are presented in the thesis.

No description available.

Installation and utilization of residential distribution transformers has not changed substantially over a long period of time. Utilities typically size their transformers based on a formula that takes into account broadly what types and how many dwellings will be connected. Most new residential dwellings feature 200 Amp service per household with an anticipated energy demand of under 20,000 kWh per year. Average electrical energy consumption varies from state to state but averages to 11,280 kWh per year. Energy demand is expected to fall into a typical residential load curve that shows increased demand early in the morning, then decreasing during the day and another peak early to late evening. Distribution transformers are sized at the limit of the combined evening peak with the assumption that the transformer has enough thermal mass to absorb short overloads that may occur when concurrent loading situations among multiple dwellings arise. The assumption that concurrent loading is of short duration and the transformer can cool off during the night time has been validated over the years and has become standard practice. This has worked well when dwelling loads follow an averaging scheme and low level of coincidence. With the arrival of electric vehicles (EV's) this assumption has to be reevaluated. The acquisition of an electric vehicle in a household can drive up energy demand by over 4000 kWh per year. Potentially problematic is the increased capacity of battery packs and the resulting proliferation of Level 2 chargers. The additional load of a single Level 2 charger concurring with the combined evening peak load will push even conservatively sized distribution transformers over their nameplate rating for a substantial amount of time. Additionally, unlike common household appliances of similar power requirements such as ovens or water heaters, a Level 2 battery charger will run at peak power consumption for several hours, and the current drawn by the EVs has very high levels of harmonic distortion. The excessive loading and harmonic profile can potentially result in damaging heat build-up resulting in asset degradation. In this thesis I present a device and method that monitors pole mounted distribution transformers for overheating, collect and wirelessly upload data and initiate commands to chargers to change output levels from Level 2 to Level 1 or shut down EV charging altogether until the transformer returns into safe operational range.

Multimodal understanding is a vast realm of research that covers multiple disciplines. Hence, it requires a correct understanding of the goal in a generic multimodal understanding research study. The definition of modalities of interest is important since each modality requires its own considerations. On the other hand, it is important to understand whether these modalities should be complimentary to each other or have significant overlap in terms of the information they carry. For example, most of the modalities in biological signals do not have significant overlap with each other, yet they can be used together to improve the range and accuracy of diagnoses. An extreme example of two modalities that have significant overlap is an instructional video and its corresponding instructions in detailed texts. In this study, we focus on multimedia, which includes image, video, audio, and text about real world everyday events, mostly focused on human activities. We narrow our study to the important direction of common space learning since we want to bridge between different modalities using the overlap that a given pair of modalities have.There are multiple applications which require a strong common space to be able to perform desirably. We choose image-text grounding, video-audio autoencoding, video-conditioned text generation, and video-audio-text common space learning for semantic encoding. We examine multiple ideas in each direction and achieve important conclusions. In image-text grounding, we learn that different levels of semantic representations are helpful to achieve a thorough common space that is representative of two modalities. In video-audio autoencoding, we observe that reconstruction objectives can help with a representative common space. Moreover, there is an inherent problem when dealing with multiple modalities at the same time, and that is different levels of granularity. For example, the sampling rate and granularity of video is much higher and more complicated compared to audio. Hence, it might be more helpful to find a more semantically abstracted common space which does not carry redundant details, especially considering the temporal aspect of video and audio modalities. In video-conditioned text generation, we examine the possibility of encoding a video sequence using a Transformer (and later decoding the captions using a Transformer decoder). We further explore the possibility of learning latent states for storing real-world concepts without supervision. Using the observations from these three directions, we propose a unified pipeline based on the Transformer architecture to examine whether it is possible to train a (true) unified pipeline on raw multimodal data without supervision in an end-to-end fashion. This pipeline eliminates ad-hoc feature extraction methods and is independent of any previously trained network, making it simpler and easier to use. Furthermore, since it only utilizes one architecture, which enables us to move towards even more simplicity. Hence, we take an ambitious step forward and further unify this pipeline by sharing only one backbone among four major modalities: image, video, audio, and text. We show that it is not only possible to achieve this goal, but we further show the inherent benefits of such pipeline. We propose a new research direction under multimodal understanding and that is Unified Multimodal Understanding. This study is the first that examines this idea and further pushes its limit by scaling up to multiple tasks, modalities, and datasets. In a nutshell, we examine different possibilities for bridging between a pair of modalities in different applications and observe several limitations and propose solutions for them. Using these observations, we provide a unified and strong pipeline for learning a common space which could be used for many applications. We show that our approaches perform desirably and significantly outperform state-of-the-art in different downstream tasks. We set a new baseline with competitive performance for our proposed research direction, Unified Multimodal Understanding.

The design of a high-frequency transformer at levels above 1 kVA is limited by the winding and core materials which are available. This res~arch presents methods for the design and modeling of a 10 kVA transformer operating at a frequency of 20 kHz using readily available materials. A special winding technique is employed to increase both energy density and transformation efficiency by reducing leakage inductance and eddy current losses in the windings. The procedures for calculating the equivalent circuit parameters applicable to this design are outlined, and the calculated values compared with the measured quantities. A thermal analysis of the design is also explored using the equivalent circuit model as a basis for the calculation. Some of the calculations are specific to this particular design, whereas others are quite generic, however the overall concepts employed in the design and analysis of this device have widespread application within the area of high-frequency, high-power transformer design. / Master of Science