ECE Master of Engineering Program
Energy Conservation and Control Project
Faculty sponsor: Bruce Land
Brief description of project goal
This project will emphasize practical approaches to sustainable energy generation, control, and use in an electrical engineering context. I am particularly interested in solar electric generation, battery technology, small scale (domestic) cogeneration and battery backup, thermoelectric devices, and low power lighting. Participation in Cornell Solar Decathlon House project (http://cusd.cornell.edu/cusd/web/index.php) will be highly encouraged.
ECE Renewable/Sustainable Energy Project
This new project will emphasize practical approaches to sustainable energy generation, control, and use in an electrical engineering context. I am particularly interested in solar electric generation, battery technology, small scale (domestic) cogeneration and battery backup, thermoelectric devices, and low power lighting. Participation in the Cornell Solar Decathlon House project will be highly encouraged.
The renewable/sustainable energy project is primarily aimed at Masters of Engineering designs, but undergraduate independent study courses will be considered also.You can infer the level of the course from the course numbers on each finished design. Some of the student designs from this page and from other courses have been published.
Potential Designs
- Domestic communcation/control protocol implementation.
- Cornell Solar Decathalon control systems
- Insteon to Automated Logic bridge
- Battery Projects
- Electric vehicle project -- Focusing on the control and final product demonstration for a small vehicle.
- Home power project -- Focusing on the integration of battery, inverter, and solar panel (or wind turbine), plus information sources like NOAA weather. Also, real field test and performance evaluation will be emphasized.
- Battery control -- The development of new mechanism for solving the cell balance and state of battery health evaluation problems. This project will focus on the software development (especially for the microcontrollers) and making prototypes.
- Solar Decathalon battery system.
- Installation projects
- Phillips ECE solar array: esthetic, political, economic, technical aspects, maybe run the big hall displays?.
- Appledore Island/Shoals Marine Lab solar, wind, hydrogen?
- Other Cornell research locations
- Design lighting control (shades, lights, etc) for ECE Director's office (Lutron homeworks?)
- Instrumentation
- Sunpower 4000 watt inverter, wireless monitor, perhaps with web interface.
- Solar cell shade tracking and dynamic panel isolation.
Dynamic reconfiguration of panels for I-V control. - MPPT using data telemetered from solar panel.
- Passive solar panel cooling for higher efficiency in hot climates: computation/simulation/testing
- Solar cell I-V, full power simulator: http://solar.anu.edu.au/level_1/Sun/help/PVguide.html, http://www.udel.edu/igert/pvcdrom/CELLOPER/VOC.HTM
- Solar hot water energy monitor, rs232 to RESOL controller + custom interface to flow meter.
- Solar hot water/secondary heater control and circulator
- Line sensing inverter with improved MPPT algorithm
- Energy use monitor with near field communication readout or with powerline communication
- Remote solar water pump controller -- tanks 100 meters from pump
- Education
- Energy video game -- 'run the grid' (board game)
- power grid simulation: PSOC, linux
- power grid simulation in Second Life
- motors, lights, watt meters, etc.
Resources:
- Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, starting Fall 2008
- Renewable Energy (Elsevier Ltd)
- Renewable Energy Annual 2005 (DOE)
- NREL (DOE)
- EERE (DOE)
- Energy Information Administration (DOE)
- Home Power magazine
- Solar Today
- Renewable Energy World
- Science Daily
- Domestic control systems
Completed Energy Designs:
CUSD control systems
by Joshua De La Rosa
REU, August 2008
HomeNet - A Wireless Network of Household Appliances
by Eric Holmberg-Weidler andDavid MacLeod
ECE691, May 2005
Secure Solar Power
by Vladimir Kozitsky
ECE693, May 2004
See also ECE 4760 final projects page:
2008 #1,
2006 #15, #16,
2004 #7, #24,
Needed Skills
Skills can range from business/technical, to power systems, to microcontroller programming, depending on the specific task the student chooses. Since this project is aimed at learning renewable energy, I do not expect that every student will be expert at all aspects of the project they choose, but will quickly learn what they need.
More Information
“The University offers a great domain for doctoral students to focus on research that advances their own field of interest as well as to bring ideas from other fields into this research. The interdisciplinary nature of the Electrical and Computer Engineering program most often helps engineers produce novel ideas and innovative designs that make a large impact on their field of study.”
- Sameer Pai, ECE MS/PhD Student