Office of Research and Grants

“In the past few years, adaptation to renewable energy and utilizing solar power has attracted an exponentially increasing interest in different countries all around the planet. More particularly in the State of Kuwait, the government has raised a requirement to prioritize and accelerate the use of the renewable energy with a target of supplying 15% of the peak electricity demand from renewable sources by 2030. Therefore, providing a reliable and fault tolerant control solution that can accomplish main objectives of the power generation even in the presence of faults, is an inevitable requirement. As stated earlier, the main objective of this research proposal is to design and develop a health monitoring system (as a proof of concept) for PV farms, where both model-based and data-driven methods are utilized in a unified framework. The outcomes of this research proposal significantly improve reliability of new generation of power supply network. Moreover, this research proposal introduces a modular solution such that it can be augmented with other available or future control systems such as automated PV cleaning systems in order to provide a fully autonomous fault tolerant control solution that can (i) detect, (ii) localize, and (iii) rectify various types of faults in PV systems (such as shade faults). Furthermore, one can consider the outcome of our proposed research as a cornerstone framework and guideline to design and develop solutions and modules, where advanced encryption algorithms are applied to maximize privacy of data in utilizing cloudbased solutions for IoT communications. Motivated by the above explanation, we believe that the outcomes of this research proposal is deeply intertwined with Kuwait’s strategic research plan in the area of “Environment, Energy and Sustainable Development” and can provide substantially advanced and state-of-the-art platform for further interdisciplinary researches in reliability of renewable energy and IoT communications.”