Energy technologies and complex systems

Energy technologies research involves experimental and simulation work on parts of electrical plants and their integration into a power network.

Conventional and non-conventional sensors and monitoring systems have been used to check the health and condition of electrical plant individually and in a power network. Such a network is one form of a complex system and the monitoring approach provides a holistic view of the network or system performance and is able to extract latent information from the acquired data.

This information can be used to identify emergent behaviour which can be utilised for diagnostic and prognostic purposes to predict system or component failure in advance or it can be used to optimise the performance of equipment/system. Economic and computational theories and algorithms also support the optimisation of energy technologies.

What is involved?

The methodologies used to address the complex behaviour of energy technologies is a generic approach to monitoring complex systems. The technology has been successfully deployed in:

• Health and domiciliary care
• Aerospace
• Rail transport
• Assessing driver fatigue
• Optimisation and control of anaerobic digesters
• Liquid quality assessment (fuel, oil, whisky etc), skin condition assessment
• Air quality.

More activities that fall under energy technologies research encompass areas of our own research in the school:

• Energy and power
• Algorithms, complexity theory and optimisation
• Economics and computation.