ELEC/TELE/PHTN 4123 Electrical/Telecommunications Design Prociency

Session 1, 2014

Lab 1: Power/Signal Processing System Design Dr Elias Aboutanios

Aim
The aim of this lab is to examine your ability to apply concepts from the areas of power and signal processing to the design and implementation of a system for the monitoring and management of power delivery systems.

Lab Organisation and Marking Scheme

The laboratory design task aims to test you on a number of components that dene your ability to behave as a professional engineer in the context of power and signal processing systems design: 1. Firstly, having acquired the relevant theory from the courses you have undertaken as part of the degree, you are required to demonstrate a basic prociency in power systems analysis and signal processing design. 2. You must be able to identify and acquire new knowledge that you are lacking and that is essential to the successful completion of the project. There will rarely be a situation where you will already have all the knowledge you need to solve a problem. Thus it is important that you can research what you do not know. 3. You need to be able to work in a logical and systematic fashion. Solving a design problem is not about nding a kit or some instructions on the web or in a textbook and following them blindly. Rather it involves making choices subject to the requirements and constraints you have. Therefore, you must identify the pre-requisite knowledge that would allow you make these choices, and exercise this knowledge in a structured way to achieve your aim. 4. You must be capable of working individually. You should be self-reliant. 5. You must also be able to work as part of a team, to present your ideas, discuss them, defend them, and provide constructive criticism to others. Your understanding of your task and your ability to communicate clearly are essential in this regard. 6. Finally, you must also be capable of applying sound design practice towards solving the design problem you are given. The laboratory will run over three sessions: a preliminary lab, an open lab session and an assessment lab session. The preliminary lab will contribute 10% to the total lab mark, the assessment will count for 80%, while remaining 10% will come from the report and self-reection exercise.

Preliminary Design Session

During this session, you are required to achieve an adequate understanding of the requirements as well as complete a preliminary design. The preliminary lab session is organised as follows: Reading time : Approximately 10 minutes to read the design task and extract the requirements. 1

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Requirements Discussion : The groups get together and discuss the requirements. This is essentially the requirements analysis phase. Approximately 15 minutes are allocated to this activity. Preliminary design phase : Duration 2-2.5hrs. It is extremely important that each group does this on their own and no interaction between the groups takes place. That is students should treat this as an exam where they are are not allowed to interact with anyone other than their partner. This is so that each group comes up with their solution and a variety of solutions are presented to the discussion phase. Design Presentation : Each team will very briey describe their solution. No questions or discussions are allowed here. A maximum of 5 or 6 minutes is allocated to each team. Design discussion : 20-30 minutes. The aim is to discuss and debate the solutions. This should be a positive discussion with constructive criticism one another in order to improve your collective chances of success. Essentially, the lab is divided into three major phases. The preparatory part, consisting of the reading time and rst discussion, and lasting about 30 minutes; the preliminary design part taking about 2.5 hrs of the lab time; and the presentation and nal discussion occupying the last hour of the lab. It is important to see the purpose behind this process. It consists of a combination of individual work and group interactions. During the rst discussion your task is to understand the requirements and identify the concepts that are required for you to complete the design task. In the second phase, the work in pairs allows you to use your knowledge to arrive at your own design. This is extremely important rstly to enable you to assess your prior knowledge and identify your weaknesses, and secondly to the success of the group session. The larger the variety of designs that are presented is, the more likely the quality of the nal design will be improved. Therefore, it is important to contribute and be able to constructively criticise the designs of others and to explain and defend your own (note that it is just as important that you see a valid point someone else might make regarding your approach). This should be done, however, in the spirit of cooperation and not competition. Imagine that you are a team in a company and are working together to produce this design. Your mark for this session will reect the quality of the contribution you make. The marks for the preliminary session are primarily allocated to the presentation and contribution to the nal discussion. Following the preliminary lab session, you have two weeks to complete your design, rene it, improve it, tweak it, or change it as you see t. During this time there is an open lab as per the schedule in the course outline. In nalising your design, you do not have to restrict yourselves to the results of the rst lab session. You must also produce your design report prior to the assessment lab. The report should include the following sections: 1. The Design Requirements : In this section you are to explain the design task and the requirements. 2. The Detailed Design : This section should explain your design in detail. 3. The implementation and Test Plan : This section should give a detailed implementation plan, including the detailed steps to get your design implemented with minimal risk. For example you should include the steps for measurement of actual component values and comparing them with nominal values. Calculations should be done to verify that deviations between actual and nominal values do not take the performance outside the acceptable bounds (that is the design should still satisfy the requirements). Test points and corresponding outputs should be clearly identied and their results documented. The implementation and test plans will be crucial in your assessment. Students will be required to submit their report through Moodle by 3pm during the assessment lab.

Assessment Session
The rst hour of the assessment lab is devoted for student teams to prepare for the marking. Each group should set up their design at their desk and the preliminary report will need to be submitted on Moodle before assessment starts (that is by 3pm). A random marking order will be announced (written on the board) and the asssessment will start at 3pm sharp. Every one will be asked to move away from their desk. Each group will be allocated a maximum of 25 minutes for the assessment. The assessors are instructed to adhere strictly to this time allocation and to uphold the schedule. You will be given no additional assessment after your assessment allocation is up and your design cannot be checked again. 5 minutes prior to the start of their assesssment, the group to be assessed may get back to their desk to be ready for the marking. It is important for you to be well prepared for the assessment. The time allocation will seem very short if you are not ready. You will rst be asked to explain and demonstrate your design. As mentioned in the course outline, 2

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you have a responsibility to show o your design and demonstrate that it works and meets the requirements. You should explain your reasoning, any assumptions you have made, design decisions you have taken, etc... If you cannot demonstrate your design, then it does not work as far as the assessor is concerned. In all this, it is dicult to overstress the importance of the implementation and test plans. You must prepare them carefully and make sure they are useful to you in the lab. Both of them will play a signicant role in your assessment. The implementation plan should give you the instructions to navigate your way from the start of the lab to a working system. The test plan should give you a clear way of testing and verifying that your system works (i.e. it does what it was designed to do, in the way it was designed to do it.) This is important both for debugging your system in case something does not work, and for demonstrating it to your lab assessor. The marking scheme for this session is based on the following criteria: Neatness of the breadboard/code. Demonstrating your design - Does your design achieve the requirements? Demonstrating your understanding, can you explain the operation of your system?

The Self-Reection Exercise

An important goal of the subject is to give you the opportunity to identify your strengths and weaknesses and so improve yourselves. Therefore, at the conclusion of the lab, you are required to reect on the experience you had, the challenges you faced, and the quality of the work you managed to achieve. The self reection exercise will be done electronically on Moodle (the deadline will be 5pm Wednesday immediately following the lab.) As part of this exercise you need to identify what you got out of the experience and where you could improve. Therefore your reection on the task should consider three elements: your strengths, your weaknesses, and how you can improve.

ELEC/TELE/PHTN 4123: Electrical/Telecommunications Design Prociency

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Appliance Multipack Board Mains Supply Power measurements Unit

PF Compensation Unit

Computer

Figure 1: Power systems monitoring and PF compensation scheme.

The Design Task

The monitoring and control of power systems is very important in order to ensure their quality and eciency are maintained. In this lab, you will implement a power monitoring and power factor (PF) compensation system that you will test using a variety of loads. The system will be based on a power measurement and PF compensation units (see Additional Information section below) and will use Matlab for the acquisition of the data, performing the relevant calculations and display, and control of the power compensation unit. A representation of the system is shown in gure 1. The monitoring system must obtain and display the following quantities: 1. Instantaneous V and I . 2. RMS V and I . 3. Active, reactive and total power. 4. The system power factor. 5. The harmonics up to the 5th: You must show plots of the harmonic waveforms as well as report their frequencies, amplitudes and RMS values. 6. The total harmonic distortion. 7. The compensated power factor. The marks will be allocated as follows: 45% for items 1 to 4, 45% for items 5 and 6, and 30% for the PF compensation subsystem and for item 7. Notice that the marks add up to more than 100% and the nal mark for the lab will be capped at 100.

Additional Information
Figure 2 shows a representation of the measurement and PF compensation units: Actual pictures of these devices are posted on Moodle.

ELEC/TELE/PHTN 4123: Electrical/Telecommunications Design Prociency

S1, 2014

Mains Supply

Power measurements Unit

PF Compensation Unit

Current Transducer LA 25NP

Voltage Transducer LV 25P

1F

2.2 F

4.7F

Figure 2: The power system measurement and PF compensation units.