Pradeep Kumar Yemula

Divyanshi Dwivedi, K. Victor Sam Moses Babu, Pradeep Kumar Yemula et al.

The global generation of renewable energy has rapidly increased, primarily due to the installation of large-scale renewable energy power plants. However, monitoring renewable energy assets in these large plants remains challenging due to environmental factors that could result in reduced power generation, malfunctioning, and degradation of asset life. Therefore, the detection of surface defects on renewable energy assets is crucial for maintaining the performance and efficiency of these plants. This paper proposes an innovative detection framework to achieve an economical surface monitoring system for renewable energy assets. High-resolution images of the assets are captured regularly and inspected to identify surface or structural damages on solar panels and wind turbine blades. {Vision transformer (ViT), one of the latest attention-based deep learning (DL) models in computer vision, is proposed in this work to classify surface defects.} The ViT model outperforms other DL models, including MobileNet, VGG16, Xception, EfficientNetB7, and ResNet50, achieving high accuracy scores above 97\% for both wind and solar plant assets. From the results, our proposed model demonstrates its potential for monitoring and detecting damages in renewable energy assets for efficient and reliable operation of renewable power plants.

Divyanshi Dwivedi, Pradeep Kumar Yemula, Mayukha Pal

Electrical Distribution Systems are extensively penetrated with Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) to cater the energy demands with the general perception that it enhances the system's resilience. However, integration of DERs may adversely affect the grid operation and affect the system resilience due to various factors like their intermittent availability, dynamics of weather conditions, non-linearity, complexity, number of malicious threats, and improved reliability requirements of consumers. This paper proposes a methodology to evaluate the planning and operational resilience of power distribution systems under extreme events and determines the withstand capability of the electrical network. The proposed framework is developed by effectively employing the complex network theory. Correlated networks for undesirable configurations are developed from the time series data of active power monitored at nodes of the electrical network. For these correlated networks, computed the network parameters such as clustering coefficient, assortative coefficient, average degree and power law exponent for the anticipation; and percolation threshold for the determination of the network withstand capability under extreme conditions. The proposed methodology is also suitable for identifying the hosting capacity of solar panels in the system while maintaining resilience under different unfavourable conditions and identifying the most critical nodes of the system that could drive the system into non-resilience. This framework is demonstrated on IEEE 123 node test feeder by generating active power time-series data for a variety of electrical conditions using simulation software, GridLAB-D. The percolation threshold resulted as an effective metric for the determination of the planning and operational resilience of the power distribution system.

Divyanshi Dwivedi, Pradeep Kumar Yemula, Mayukha Pal

The expansion in technology and attainability of a large number of sensors has led to a huge amount of real-time streaming data. The real-time data in the electrical distribution system is collected through distribution-level phasor measurement units referred to as $μ$PMU which report high-resolution phasor measurements comprising various event signatures which provide situational awareness and enable a level of visibility into the distribution system. These events are infrequent, unschedule, and uncertain; it is a challenge to scrutinize, detect and predict the occurrence of such events. For electrical distribution systems, it is challenging to explicitly identify evolution functions that describe the complex, non-linear, and non-stationary signature patterns of events. In this paper, we seek to address this problem by developing a physics dynamics-based approach to detect anomalies in the $μ$PMU streaming data and simultaneously predict the events using governing equations. We propose a data-driven approach based on the Hankel alternative view of the Koopman (HAVOK) operator, called DynamoPMU, to analyze the underlying dynamics of the distribution system by representing them in a linear intrinsic space. The key technical idea is that the proposed method separates out the linear dynamical behaviour pattern and intermittent forcing (anomalous events) in sequential data which turns out to be very useful for anomaly detection and simultaneous data prediction. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed framework through analysis of real $μ$PMU data taken from the LBNL distribution grid. DynamoPMU is suitable for real-time event detection as well as prediction in an unsupervised way and adapts to varying statistics.