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- All Subjects: Signal Processing
- All Subjects: Load management
- Creators: Electrical Engineering Program
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
As more electric vehicles (EVs) are adopted, users need a solution to meet their expectations when it comes to Level 2 EV Charging (EVC). Currently, Adaptive Charging (AC) Techniques are used in multi-unit, public, settings. In the future, AC should be utilized to provide an optimized charging experience for the EV user in a single-unit residential application. In this experiment, an Electric Vehicle simulation tool was created using Python. A training dataset was generated from Alternative Fuels and Data Center (EVI-Pro) using charging data from Phoenix, Arizona. Similarly, the utility price plan chosen for this exercise was SRP Electric Vehicle Price plan. This will be the cost-basis for the thesis. There were four cases that were evaluated by the simulation tool. (1) Utility Guided Scheduling (2) Automatic Scheduling (3) Off-Site Enablement (4) Bidirectional enablement. These use-cases are some of the critical problems facing EV users when it comes to charging at home. Each of these scenarios and algorithms were proven to save the user money in their daily bill. Overall, the user will need some sort of weighted scenario that considers all four cases to provide the best solution to the user. All four scenarios support the use of Adaptive Charging techniques in residential level 2 electric vehicle chargers. By applying these techniques, the user can save up to 90% on their energy bill while offsetting the energy grid during peak hours. The adaptive charging techniques applied in this thesis are critical to the adoption of the next generation electric vehicles. Users need to be enabled to use the latest and greatest technology. In the future, individuals can use this report as a baseline to use an Artificial Intelligence model to make an educated case-by-case decision to deal with the variability of the data.
This Honors Thesis is a continuation of Prof. Lauren Hayes’s and Dr. Xin Luo’s research initiative, Haptic Electronic Audio Research into Musical Experience (HEAR-ME), which investigates how to enhance the musical listening experience for CI users using a wearable haptic system. The goals of this Honors Thesis are to adapt Prof. Hayes’s system code from the Max visual programming language into the C++ object-oriented programming language and to study the results of the developed C++ codes. This adaptation allows the system to operate in real-time and independently of a computer.
Towards these goals, two signal processing algorithms were developed and programmed in C++. The first algorithm is a thresholding method, which outputs a pulse of a predefined width when the input signal falls below some threshold in amplitude. The second algorithm is a root-mean-square (RMS) method, which outputs a pulse-width modulation signal with a fixed period and with a duty cycle dependent on the RMS of the input signal. The thresholding method was found to work best with speech, and the RMS method was found to work best with music. Future work entails the design of adaptive signal processing algorithms to allow the system to work more effectively on speech in a noisy environment and to emphasize a variety of elements in music.
The idea for this thesis emerged from my senior design capstone project, A Wearable Threat Awareness System. A TFmini-S LiDAR sensor is used as one component of this system; the functionality of and signal processing behind this type of sensor are elucidated in this document. Conceptual implementations of the optical and digital stages of the signal processing is described in some detail. Following an introduction in which some general background knowledge about LiDAR is set forth, the body of the thesis is organized into two main sections. The first section focuses on optical processing to demodulate the received signal backscattered from the target object. This section describes the key steps in demodulation and illustrates them with computer simulation. A series of graphs capture the mathematical form of the signal as it progresses through the optical processing stages, ultimately yielding the baseband envelope which is converted to digital form for estimation of the leading edge of the pulse waveform using a digital algorithm. The next section is on range estimation. It describes the digital algorithm designed to estimate the arrival time of the leading edge of the optical pulse signal. This enables the pulse’s time of flight to be estimated, thus determining the distance between the LiDAR and the target. Performance of this algorithm is assessed with four different levels of noise. A calculation of the error in the leading-edge detection in terms of distance is also included to provide more insight into the algorithm’s accuracy.