Desing and development of a novel smart-meter for improved Smart Grid management

Desing and development of a novel smart-meter for improved Smart Grid managementThe electric networks are shifting to a new architecture called Smart Grid, this concept consist in the utilization of new technologies and tool to improve the performance and the reliability of the network, offering solution to the upcoming challenges of the energy generation and distribution. The paradigm of Internet of Things (IoT) is used to proceed in the evolutions, this approach aims to deploy devices that are connected among them and can receive and submit commands and information through Internet. With the evolution of the electric networks towards the concept of smart grid there is an increasing necessity of new tools and devices that helps in this progression to enable new feature for both the energy suppliers and the users. One among the various devices that will be used more and more in this future scenario are the so-called smart-meters. Most the meters employed nowadays are used for billing purposes and are only able to collect data regarding the power usage of the customers and communicate it to the suppliers. The upcoming meter instead are designed to use already know technologies like Internet communications to increase the possible function that they can perform. Despite on the market devices like that are already available there is still no meter that satisfies all the needs and most of these is quite expensive and it is not feasible to deploy many of them. With this concept in mind the work done for this project aimed to realize a prototype of a smart-meter and a software infrastructure that satisfy the requirements considered essential: the software should be able to manage all the devices deployed on the grid and update them while the devices should be low cost and Internet connected. Before the design of the device some researches have been done to analyze what features were offered by the meter already available on the market, to examine the proposal done in the literature and which are the challenges to face in the design process. After this preliminary observation some guidelines were defined to proceed in the work: the device developed in this thesis must be able to self-configure itself when installed and auto-update according to the situations and the requests. On the other hand, the software infrastructure must be able to manage all the meters, keeps a list of the active devices and constantly updating their settings. To realize the meter two open source low cost devices were used: an MCC USB-201 that is a data acquisition board with up to 8 analogic inputs and a Raspberry Pi 3 that is well known single board computer with a 1.2GHz CPU. The meter is able to collect the measurements of voltages and currents, it can selectively run three algorithms for smart grid management and is an element of a distributed software infrastructure that supports smart grid self-healing. The main actor of software infrastructure developed to support this meters is constituted by a software called Device Catalog that takes enables the self-configuration and the auto-update of the meters and control the execution of their function. The meter and the infrastructure were then tested using a Real Time Simulator and exploiting the Hardware in the Loop (HIL) technique. This approach allows to perform the test in a safe environment emulating the behaviour of a real electric network avoiding all the constraints and the risk of a test done in the field. The results of the test were then analyzed to underline the benefit that such devices could bring to the reliability of the grid and the management process