Three years gone, Six months to go… (almost anyway)

I remember being told by my Mum that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And all my good intentions at the time last year to blog bi-weekly definitely have made my path to the hot place a little bit more easy. So, in penance and to try blogging again here we go.

A lot has happened since September last year, and I'm not quite sure how best to do this, so I've decided to give a bit of photo diary of the last 12 months to give a taste of what's been going on both in PhD-world and my own.

In October/November I was working on the stability analysis of parallel inverters, using small signal stability analysis, the results of the analysis match the simulations relatively well, hopefully these will also match the experimental work as well. Below is the pole-zero plot for the parallel inverters.

Pole-zero plot for parallel inverters

I met one of the founders of Learning Planet, Justin Wickham, in London to discuss the pico hydro scheme they are looking at. You can see more of the area Learning Planet are in here or have a look on their website www.learningplanet.org.uk.

 

The School in Dhawa renovated by Learning Planet

My cousin Helen got married at the end of October, so we headed over to Ireland to celebrate.

Helen and me at her wedding

I helped on the sound desk again with Horfield Theatre Company for their October pantomime, Franky Panky and had a lot of fun - with innuendo and a lot of childish humour. I'm getting a little bit better on the sound, although every so often the wrong person's mic would be turned up… A fun fun week nonetheless!

Franky Panky's Poster

I had a "cruise" to Bruges with my little sister, which was fun - especially all the chocolate!

Me and a bear in Bruges

During November and December I wrote a paper on the experimental turbine work I'd been doing, and submitted it to the Journal of Applied Energy at the beginning of January. It was finally accepted in June, and published here in July! The paper that I presented at WREC was also published in Renewable Energy Journal in July this year as well, here.

A figure from the Applied Energy journal, the slug of water that's ingested by the turbine in one rotation

In the last weekend of November, Hannah and I went to Salisbury to celebrate two years. We had a fun couple of days and saw Stonehenge, the Cathedral, Avebury and the Uffington White Horse.

The Stone Circle at Avebury

I spent Christmas with my parents and sisters, which was great.

With my family at Mount Edgecombe

Back in the lab, I started working on an improved control system to try and reduce any current spikes when the two inverters connected together so that switches won't go bang when the inverters are connected to a grid. This improved control did what it was supposed to in the simulation.

Reduced current spikes on paralleling inverters

I had another family wedding in Ireland, my cousin Gillian got married in early February and Hannah and I headed over for the weekend. Unfortunately snow made our journey back delayed… (I blame Gillian's sister, Jenny, who flew back with us!)

Gillian and Alex's wedding

I found an IEEE conference in Kathmandu that would take place in late September, known as ICSET. I wrote two papers for this conference, one on the turbine testing and the other on a simulation of a off-grid pico hydro network, submitting them by the end of March, which were approved. I'm off to Nepal on the 17th September, which is going to be amazing.

A simple model of an off-grid pico hydro network

I also attended and presented at the EWB research conference at UCL at the end of March, adding to the stress at the time, but really enjoyed it and was interested to hear some of the other projects going on in the EWB universe.

AC grid with distributed generators connected with inverter front ends

After submitting the papers, Hannah and I went off to India for two weeks, and had the most fantastic time. We spent a week in Kerala and a week in Bangalore, and had some amazing experiences, spending a night on a houseboat, riding on an elephant, and visiting some beautiful parts of the countryside.

On a houseboat in Alleppey, Kerala

On returning from India, I started to build some electronics, starting with a simple inverter, four switches and an inductor-capacitor filter. I built a simple control circuit in analogue components to control the output current to a reference sine wave from a signal generator. The circuit managed to produce a relatively good output.

Inverter Mk1 and Output

At the end of April, Hannah and I went to see one of my favourite bands, Feeder, in Cardiff. They were absolutely amazing. Enough said.

At the Feeder gig

By the beginning of May, it was time to do 'Living Below the Line' again (see last years version here). We raised money for MRDF and this time, there were a good 10 of us that did it.

Pasta Dinner during Live Below The Line

Once the original inverter worked, I built a second checking it worked with the basic controller, and then used a real time controller called dSPACE which can use MATLAB models to control things, allowing quick changes to be made to the model and be able to see the result of it. Both inverters worked controlled by the dSPACE which was great.

Parallel Inverters with dSPACE

The Olympic Torch came to Bristol in May, and we went down to the Harbourside to see it. The city was buzzing, and we had a fantastic time watching it arrive.

Olympic Torch arriving in Bristol

I ran a quick tour of the Hydrolab for the University of Bristol's Open Day in June, and showed some of the potential new students around and demonstrated the turbine rig. By the end of the day, my voice was hoarse, but had talked to many hundreds of people.

Turbine rig running

Obviously with London holding the Olympics, I wasn't going to miss going to see some events. We went to see the Beach Volleyball on Horseguards Parade and some Hockey in the Olympic Park, just a most fantastic experience.

Beach Volleyball at Horseguards Parade

Once each of the inverters worked individually, I connected them together, to see how they would work in parallel. They synchronised without blowing up, which was always good, and now in my work I'm trying to improve the performance of the system.

Parallel inverters

Every year Bristol holds an International Balloon Fiesta in Ashton Court, on the outskirts of Bristol. We went to the Nightglow, where the balloons light up to music, and saw a mass take off with Tim, who had come over from New Zealand.

Balloons at the Nightglow

We had a few days in Cornwall, camping. It rained, well it was Cornwall after all, but had a few nice and sunny days, especially down on the Lizard and ate some rather tasty ice-cream too…

Lizard Lighthouse in the sunshine!

A couple of weeks later we returned to Cornwall for a school friend's wedding. Again it rained, and it didn't really let up this time. Argh. Still, we enjoyed an ice-cream in the rain.

Hannah eating an Ice-cream in the rain at Lanhydrock

As well as the Olympics, we also got some tickets for the Paralympics, this time for the swimming, athletics and also saw some judo and table tennis. If anything, we enjoyed this more than the Olympics, the atmosphere was just incredible.

The long jump in the Olympic Stadium

And straight from the Paralympics we headed to the Small is Festival 2012. I had been asked to do a little workshop on pico hydro, and so designed a workshop to build a little crossflow turbine and test it, the workshop went really well and I had a very inspirational weekend. And it didn't rain!

The workshop at Small is Festival

So, hopefully now you're all about caught up with me and my life. I'm really sorry it's taken so long to do this, but I hope I'll be a bit more regular. Not long to go with the PhD now either. Times are scary and fun!

SAM

Busy Busy

There hasn't been many photo opportunities over the last few months, so I've put up some random photos I've taken on my phone just to brighten up the writing!

Scrabble problems

I don't quite know where the time has gone since coming back from Nepal. I've been finishing my turbine selection section of my work, and now have an idea of where I'm going mechanically. I've even submitted a paper to the World Renewable Energy Conference 2011 in Sweden about my selection method and outcomes, as it's not the usual way to select a turbine. Now, I'm modelling the turbine in a bit more detail and looking to see how I can experiment with it. Which comes to one of the frustrations I've reached. I thought I'd be doing a lot more practical experiments, but I suppose you have to do the theory first and come up with some ideas before you can test them. It's not the sitting in labs and fiddling with switches and buttons that I thought it would be. Not yet anyway.

Swappable heads on top of my computer

In PhD-land I've also been reading into the electrical side of things - how grids are made, how generators are connected together, control systems for these and so on. It's meant reaching into the deepest depths of my memory and trying to retrieve my old electrotechnology lectures. This has actually been very interesting, realising why things are done as they are in this world: the choice of 50Hz as a standard frequency in Europe, reading the history of the electrical current wars between direct (constant) advocated by Thomas Edison and alternating with Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse beating its drum. (To read about the current wars see here). I've also spent some time looking at the National Grid here in the UK, as this can provide ideas on how to operate a remote electrical grid. There's an interesting bit on the BBC about how the National Grid copes (or doesn't as the case may be) with the peak in demand at the end of Eastenders here.

Lights in Bristol city centre

The Welsh translation of microwave - such an onomatopoeic description! From the Centre for Alternative Technology

I've been doing a lot outside uni as well. I've been asked to be Deputy Stage Manager in Horfield Theatre Company's latest production, Bad Girls - the musical. I think it's going to be fun!

I went to the Ashden Awards in London on the 1st July. These are awards for sustainable energy solutions. This year there were some interesting and a wide variety of finalists. I thought it was great to see Okehampton College and St Columb Minor School, as they were spreading the knowledge amongst children, which worked its way back to their homes. The Isle of Eigg in Scotland had formed a remote grid using hydro, wind, solar and diesel which was great.

I spent a long time talking to the MD of Eigg Electric about the operation of their grid. It is a fantastic example of how renewable energy sources can be used to link up and supply communities. Although it would be great to implement similar schemes across the UK, Eigg has several advantages. They are a solid community, with everyone working to the same goal - partly due to their island location. On the mainland this sense of community doesn't really exist as much. They also accept limitations on their power - a maximum of 5kW per household. I think that most consumers wouldn't like the power being cut whilst using their electric shower if someone switched on the kettle. And also the cost of it was very high. Pico and Micro hydro is normally quoted at about $1000 per kW generation (£700/kW). On Eigg, however, the cost was £5440 per kW - and that is including the two 80kW standby diesel generators. I just don't think it's commercially viable still. Soon, hopefully, the price of the technology will reduce and maybe this shining example will be replicated all over the country and the world.

Having a lie down on Bridge Valley Road in the Midnight Walk

Last year Lynne Richards, a most wonderful woman who I had the pleasure of knowing, sadly passed away. St Peter's Hospice in Bristol supported Lynne and her family. St Peter's was organising a Midnight Walk, where women would walk 10 miles around Bristol. It seemed very appropriate to us all, as it would be on the same day that Lynne died last year, so a team of ladies from church was going to attempt it. Not to be out done, a group of men, including me, decided we would support them all by marshalling on the route. I was posted on the closed Bridge Valley Road, and enjoyed watching all the women puffing and panting coming up the road. When we returned to the finish, I regretted my previous smugness as I was tasked in cutting the tags from everyone's sweaty ankle. Karma.

Lynne's Ladies, Me and Jim on Bridge Valley Road

It's strange how things happen, this morning I woke up with an idea. I think it may be the basis of the idea, the idea that is going to push my research into the unknown, which is where I should be heading. It's been exciting trying to write it down to understand how I'm going to accomplish it. It's going to take a long time to develop it properly, but I finally have an idea. Woo.

I'm off to Greece for a couple of weeks now, one of my close friends is getting married. I'm looking forward to the break, sunshine, and a chance to sleep.

For now

SAM