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

Firsts

This last month has been a month of firsts.

At the end of October, I got my first abstract accepted for a conference. I wrote an abstract on the turbine selection method I've used to select my turbine, and submitted it to the World Renewable Energy Congress (WREC) Conference in May 2011 which will take place in Sweden. All this means that I actually have to write the paper I had envisaged when I wrote the abstract (argh, might be quite difficult!) and I will require a trip to Sweden in May next year to present it (yeay!).

I've spent most of the time since finishing my first year report designing my turbine test rig. I've ordered the first few components and these have been slowly starting to arrive. I'm particularly excited about the torque transducer, a little shaft inside a box that will measure the torque coming from my turbine. It uses strain gauges bonded to the shaft, and a wireless transmission of the torque valve back to the output. Can't believe how much of a geek I'm turning into...

HBM Torque Transducer

As some of the components designs have been fixed, I've also cut my first pieces out. The workshop in the university has acquired a 2D laser cutter, able to cut some plastics and wood. The designs from CAD can be directly loaded onto it, meaning a short lead time between designing and actually holding the finished component. This has been quite exciting for me again, I've been able to draw something on my computer, then a few minutes later I can hold it in my hand. I've now built my first assembly in the rig.

First assembly for the rig

The other side to the turbine rig is the way to control the head, and allow it to vary between the required values. As the turbine testing will be carried out in the university's Hydro Lab, it must be able to fit in there. We've been looking at the many different options to use and control the flow available from the header tanks in the lab. It's not something I had immediately thought of, how will I control the head? I mean, the aim of the test is to test the turbine, so that's what I've been focussing on, but there are many other parts behind the main headline test that need to be thought of and designed to ensure the testing is relevant, accurate and repeatable. This is my first foray into experimental research, and I'm learning a lot.

All in all, the PhD seems to be progressing OK. There are a few frustrations I'm hitting up against. As in all universities, the workshop are overworked, so any custom pieces I need them to make may have a long lead time. I also have to give myself a bit of a kick up the backside. I've got a lot of different parts to this project, the turbine experiment, turbine modelling, grid control development, literature, papers etc. and I need to keep on top of all of them. At the moment, I feel as if I'm letting some of them fall by the wayside to allow for the things that excite me the most currently - most particularly the turbine rig. I need to also keep myself in check, make sure that I don't make rushed decisions on things.

During the last week of October I was Deputy Stage Manager (DSM) for my first show, Bad Girls - The Musical. A DSM controls the show, giving the go for the start, all the lighting, sound and other cues. The first few runs through the show were very stressful, trying to make sure that everything happened. But as the week went on, all the technical team got used to the play and we really clicked. They were all fantastic, especially as for most of them it was the first time they had had a technical role. The play was reviewed by the Bristol Evening Post, the review can be found here. Overall, I think the play went amazingly well, I'm looking forward to the next one now.

And the next show isn't too far away. The final first is that I'm producing a talent show at church, with lots of help obviously (thanks in anticipation Howard, Vera, Cherry, and all the performers!). So Saturday night will be an evening of interesting talents, very much looking forward to it!

SAM

The first 3 months

I don't know quite what I expected from PhD-land. I knew I had a lot to learn. I was very scared about this. I knew that there were going to be a lot of people who knew a lot more that me. I was very scared of this. I knew I was going to be a lot older than most of the other post graduate researchers, and even some of the post docs. I was very scared of this. And I knew I was going back into full time education, somewhere I had escaped from 5 years before. I was very scared.

However, I knew I was going to be doing some work that could have a real impact, and this was the thing that excited me the most.

On the first day, I had my bag all packed with the text books, note books, pens, pencils and everything one would need for the first day of school.

Things for the first day

The first month or so was getting used to everything. I spent time researching different turbine types, looking at their performance characteristics and where they are used. I learnt a lot about power electronics, the basics on how they work, what they do and so on, and build a switch-mode power supply (SMPS). This can take any voltage level input and give a constant voltage output, and is the backbone of many modern power supplies.

The switch-mode power supply

It was fun building the SMPS, I hadn't really build many electronic circuits before, so the method and testing of it was quite new to me. However, after a quite a few burnt fingers, a little bit of swearing, and putting things around the right way, I eventually got it to work.

I then started to look at the research in the field of pico hydropower. There is surprisingly large amount out there, different people experimenting with new turbine concepts, controllers, generators and loads. The whole spectrum. I realised that although I was going to become an expert in this, it would be just a small area. I would though need a good understanding of all the issues surrounding them as well.

In November, I took a few days off to see a friend in Cockermouth, up in the Lake District. The weekend I planned was one week after the terrible floods up there, the devastation was incredible. The high street was free from water again, but all the shops and houses along there were ruined. We went to nearby Keswick, which didn't get any flooding. It's amazing how localised things like that can be.

Derwent Water

At the beginning of December all the press were focussed on Copenhagen. All the world hoped that an agreement could be made to help stop the climate change calamitous spiral we have set ourselves on. Although everyone is responsible, we do look to our governments for leadership as well. As a part of this, I joined a march in the centre of London called the Wave. Groups from all across the UK, religious, environmental activists, aid organisations, and ordinary people turned up to show how important getting an agreement was. At 3pm on a rainy afternoon, we all waved at the Houses of Parliament to show that we cared and wanted them to represent us with action. However, as we all know, they all left Copenhagen with nothing. Another seemingly impotent gathering of world leaders who can only talk and not actually do anything.

During the Wave march in London

And then it was Christmas. I wasn't quite sure where the time had gone. I had achieved some things, a plan of what I wanted to do for the next few months, I'd found a number of useful papers and was slowly understanding where the level of technology was that I wanted to use. I also was learning about practical electrics, and so decided to light up the lab a little.

Fairy lights in the lab

As Christmas party season approached, I was looking forward to seeing my old office friends, and going home. I had only really had a couple of weeks at home since returning from Nepal in April, what with work, university and other things.

And so here I am. So, Happy Christmas, and here's looking forward to a great 2010!

SAM

The Return of the Student...

Something quite exciting has happened. Whilst I was in Nepal, I was talking to Brian at PEEDA about what I'd do when I returned to the UK. I said I'd like to do something in hydropower, ideally something pico or micro scale, however, I realised that I'd probably need some sort of further education to be able to work in the field. So, I began looking for hydropower courses, and found a PhD at the University of Bristol in Low Head Pico Hydropower.

After a few telephone calls from Nepal, and a rather scratchy telephone interview later, I somehow got the PhD. I would be starting in October 2009. I couldn't really publicise it too much when I returned, as I had to go back to my old job and earn a bit of cash.

So six months after my return, and here I am ready to start my PhD. Its full title is Modular and Scalable Low Head Pico Hydro Generation in Off-Grid Networks, which can be roughly translated into - how to connect lots of low head pico hydro units together.

I'm really rather scared. It's been a long time since I've studied, I'm going to be a lot older than most of the other post graduate researchers and its main focus is going to be on the electrical side of the technology which is something I don't have a lot of background in. However, it will be a challenge, a project with a proper real world application and hopefully will allow me to travel out to Nepal and maybe other places in the world to do some testing.

Fingers crossed!

SAM