Chanaka Keerthisinghe

In the future, residential energy users will seize the full potential of demand response schemes by using an automated smart home energy management system (SHEMS) to schedule their distributed energy resources. The underlying optimisation problem facing a SHEMS is a sequential decision making problem under uncertainty because the states of the devices depend on the past state. There are two major challenges to optimisation in this domain; namely, handling uncertainty, and planning over suitably long decision horizons. In more detail, in order to generate high quality schedules, a SHEMS should consider the stochastic nature of the photovoltaic (PV) generation and energy consumption. In addition, the SHEMS should accommodate predictable inter-daily variations over several days. Ideally, the SHEMS should also be able to integrate into an existing smart meter or a similar device with low computational power. However, extending the decision horizon of existing solution techniques for seq...

ABSTRACT Depletion of fossil fuels and growing concerns about climate change have resulted in an increasing trend towards the use of sustainable technologies such as electric vehicles (EVs). As a result, effective means of charging EVs and managing EVs has become one of the most researched topics in the past few years. Among the many solutions proposed, inductive power transfer (IPT) systems, especially bi-directional IPT systems, are gaining popularity as an effective method to wirelessly interface EVs with the utility grid for charging as well as dynamic demand management. To enable wide spread use of bi-directional IPT technology for interfacing EVs with the gird essentially requires low cost and efficient magnetic couplers. As such, this paper investigates three new low cost magnetic designs, as alternatives to commonly used circular couplers. The proposed designs along with a standard circular coupler with similar ratings are modeled and simulated on JMAG studio to compare the performance. Based on the simulation data and experimental results gathered from a prototype implementation, the most effective design that yields a good coupling for the lowest cost has been identified as a possible solution for magnetic couplers used in bi-directional IPT systems.