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Date
June 2011 - November 2012
Status
Officially opened by Dr Mike Nahan, WA Parliamentary Secretary for Energy, on 26 November 2012.
Project Description

The GEEP Laboratory is a multi-use teaching and research facility that combines multiple different renewable energy sources with a commercial scale power management and micro-grid infrastructure. The GEEP Laboratory Data Management System integrates all the critical operational functions of the Laboratory.

Each of the ten renewable energy sources can be connected to any one of ten student or four research workstations via the micro-grid. Each workstation includes its own power management network that allows the incoming power signals to be switched through a combination of inverters, load banks, batteries etc as required. Real-time and historical data from any single workstation can be re-distributed via a data server to any subset of the Laboratory workstations, or to any external display with authorised access to the Laboratory network, depending upon the requirements of the teaching and research staff.

The system acquires and logs over 300 I/O items 24/7, including: Low-speed and high-speed voltage and current data from critical grid or network points, OPC and web-based data from commercial “smart” devices such as inverters etc, and Serial data from a commercial site weather station and various ancillary devices. The high-speed data stream is used to visualise dynamic features of the AC sub-grid. Data is acquired at 5,000 samples/s and analysed and logged in both the time and frequency domains.

All raw and processed data is available via a real-time data server and historical database to any workstation or authorised network access point. Teaching and research staff can create logical data groups as required that combine any subset of the total I/O point set.

Awards

PACE Zenith Awards 2013 Winnner: Best Power & Energy Management

Integration Products

NI CompactRIO, LabVIEW Real-Time, LabVIEW FPGA, LabVIEW Datalogging and Supervisory Control (DSC) Toolkit, SMA power management devices

Find Out More

Find out more about the GEEP Laboratory at Curtin University.