A lecturer and a postgraduate student from the Engineering Institute of Technology (EIT) recently virtually attended the 29th IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Electronics (ISIE2020) from the 17th to the 19th of July. ISIE focuses on advancements in knowledge, new methods, and technologies relevant to industrial electronics – along with their applications and future developments. EIT’s two representatives submitted academic papers at the symposium to report their findings on vitally important topics to the industry. Their contributions will spur innovation in the industry, and provide solutions to engineering problems prevalent in both the energy and renewable energy sectors.
Dr. Seyed Morteza Alizadeh started his position as a Lecturer at EIT’s Melbourne campus in July 2019, conducting classes for our Master of Engineering (Electrical Systems) and Master of Engineering (Industrial Automation) courses EIT offers. Soon after he joined EIT, he was promoted to research coordinator with a strong focus on research activities in EIT’s freshly announced Professional Doctorate program. Dr. Alizadeh this year presented two papers at the 29th IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Electronics (ISIE2020). Both of the papers have now been published in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library – a research database for academics in the computer science, electrical engineering, and electronics industries.
“IEEE has a key role in educating, standardizing, and innovating the electronic development industry. It has provided professional engineers across multiple industries with valuable resources and tools,” Dr. Alizadeh explained. “IEEE has an active portfolio of around 1,300 standards which makes it as a leading developer of industry standards in a wide range of technologies used by people in everyday life.”
One of the papers Dr. Alizadeh presented at the symposium was based on the thesis work of one of EIT’s postgraduate students Samuel Afotey. The student completed his thesis remotely under supervision. Entitled ‘Investigation into the impact of Cable Failure localisation methods on the Underground Cable Life Time in a Medium Voltage Distribution Network,’ it was awarded the ‘Best Paper Award’ at ISIE2020.
Afotey’s paper focused on the use of underground cables essential to power distribution networks. The thesis particularly honed in on the impact of underground cable fault localisation methods on the cable lifetime and proposals on cable testing techniques. The paper utilized data from a use case of an electricity distribution network in an urban region of Ghana.
“The testing practices proposed enable to reduce the adverse impact of fault current and harmonic generated during the cable testing process, which is the significance of the presented over the existing cable testing methods,” Dr. Alizadeh explained. “The work helps guide and enables the engineers and designers to carry out an initial assessment on the major causes of cable failure and provide them with the knowledge on how to minimize the adverse impact of underground cable testing,”
Dr. Alizadeh also had a paper that himself and colleagues prepared on renewable energy. IEEE has published the report he unveiled at the symposium. The report titled: ‘A Mathematical Method for Induction Generator Based Wind Power Plant Sizing and Siting in Distribution Network,’ The papers that have now been published will be accessed by engineers and researchers all around the world.
Furthermore, Dr. Alizadeh chaired a conference session on ‘Power Systems and Smart Grids’ at IEEE’s symposium. He is intrigued by the development of renewable energy-based power plants that are being engineered to minimize the number of fossil fuel burning technologies existing in energy industries worldwide.
“In my point of view, the renewable energy-based power plants have been significantly developed, and there are many large-scale on-going projects in many countries to increase the penetration of renewable energy sources for producing electricity. However, in many countries, the existing renewable energy-based power systems have the capacity of supplying the intermediate or peak load while the base load is still provided by fossil fuel-fired power plants. This has increased the environmental issues such as air pollution and global warming,” Dr. Alizadeh said.
At the conference session he chaired, Dr. Alizadeh was fascinated by an engineer from Bosch Company who presented a paper titled ‘Load Profile Cycle Recognition for Industrial DC Microgrids with Energy Storage Systems.’ The hope is that, especially in developing countries, that renewable energy technologies can form part of the base-load of countries’ energy capacity, so they don’t have to rely on fossil fuels as much.
“The investigation of different aspects of renewable energy power systems, for example, power quality and voltage analysis, frequency stability and technical issues for grid interconnection in the renewable energy-based power systems, is a very exciting research prospect in the power engineering field and much research has either already been completed or in progress,” Dr. Alizadeh concluded.
