Biography

Dr. Mohammad Amin is an Associate Professor at the Department of Electric Power Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim Norway. He received the M.Sc. degree in electric power engineering from Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, and the Ph.D. in Engineering Cybernetics from NTNU in 2011 and 2017, respectively. Previously, he was a Senior Research Associate in the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago from 2017 to 2019. He was with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in International Islamic University Chittagong, Bangladesh from 2008 to 2013. Dr Amin has research experiences from five countries: USA, Norway, China, Sweden and Bangladesh.

Dr Amin's research activities mainly focus on power electronics application to power system, application of artificial intelligence in power electronics system, distributed generation, renewable energy integration, HVDC transmission, FACTS, microgrid, smart grids, hybrid or fully electric vehicles, and robust control theory for power electronics system. His vision is to develop a top research center that fully explores the beauty of seamless integration of control and power electronics and addresses fundamental problems in various electric power systems.

TOPIC: Intelligent Controls for Distributed Generation Sources: Do we need them?

Abstract

The world agrees that something must be done to reduce global warming and climate change. To reduce the environmental impact and the need for decarbonization, it needs to accommodate more clean and sustainable energy sources. Therefore, the integration of renewables and distributed energy generation into the power grid has occurred rapidly over the last decade and will continue to increase in the future. The key drivers for this are the distributed generation (DG), largely driven by power electronics-based advanced technology adoption of intermittent renewable energy sources (RES) such as solar energy, wind energy as well as the energy storage system (ESS), electric vehicles (EV), and highly dynamic power electronics loads. These power electronics-based DGs are non-linear in nature and required to operate in a non-sinusoidal and unbalanced regime. Therefore, the effective application of this technology depends on the appropriate modeling and analysis, control design, and successful implementation of the control algorithm of the power electronics converter (PEC).

Due to the complexity of these PEC-based interconnections, different instability and interaction phenomena, such as sub-synchronous oscillation, harmonic pollution, and unplanned shut-down, have been experienced in the electric power system. If these electrical oscillations are sustained or underdamped, they can introduce a serious problem to the grid and subsequently lead to grid failure. The conventional decoupled proportional-integral (PI) control of the DG converter imposes several limitations on the controller performance due to assumptions such as linearity and time invariance. Among numerous control approaches, the use of an artificial neural network (ANN) draws attention to the research of artificial intelligence (AI) based converter controls. In this talk, a discussion on the intelligent control based on ANN for grid-connected inverter-based DG resources will be discussed, and will explore the potential application in modern distributed DG resources.