Rawie Neil Laborce, Alex Skidelsky, and Leon Chan
supervised by Dr. Bala Venkatesh, Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Academic Director of the Centre of Urban Energy at Ryerson University
With the concern of climate change and rising energy prices, renewable energy such as solar and wind are now becoming popular among North Americans, especially Ontarian's, whose province are creating provisions such as the Micro-Fit Program to promote the use in renewable energy. Smart technology has also been on the rise in the past few years, allowing devices to communicate with each other by sending and retrieving useful information. This project fuses the idea of renewable energy and smart technology to ultimately help consumers such as homeowners attain maximal renewable energy while minimizing energy costs. The objective is to create software application that can be used on a touch-PC tablet that can be placed onto the wall of the home. This software application would be able to control the power flow of electrical devices such as solar panels, battery and loads by implementing the use of an optimization algorithm and controllable switches. This engineering design project utilizes three specializations from electrical engineering and computer engineering: 1) the optimization algorithm of the home's power and load flow will be designed by the power engineer, 2) the communication protocol of the controllable switches and transmitters will be designed by the communications engineer and 3) the Graphical User Interface and implementation of the optimization algorithm and communication protocol will be designed by the computer engineer.
Project targeted applications: For Smart-Homes with electrical power devices such as solar/wind energy and battery banks.