Research student wins Best Conference Paper Award

Engineering PhD student, Mazin Muhssin, has been awarded the Best Conference Paper Award at the “Smart Energy” category at the IEEE International Conference on Smart Systems and Technologies, 2016, for his paper “Modelling of a population of Heat Pumps as a Source of load in the Great Britain power system”. The conference, held in Croatia, presented awards in three categories: Smart Energy, Control Systems and Intelligent Transportation Systems, and they were chosen from a large number of participants from 20 countries.

This paper has been developed from Mazin’s PhD research and explains the modelling of a large population of domestic heat pumps as a source of controllable loads in the UK’s future power system. The input data of the heat pumps was obtained based on a collaboration with ElementeEnergy. The extended model proposes a solution for the problem of the fast rate of change of grid frequency in future power systems with a large penetration of wind generation. National Grid, in its System Operability Framework 2016 report, has clearly stated that this problem may be a real challenge facing the UK’s future power system. The proposed model will be validated through the integration of the model with the whole transmission Great Britain system model developed by National Grid. Future work will be done in collaboration with National Grid.

The research was partly funded by The Higher Committee for Education Development in Iraq (HCED-program). Mazin is supervised by Dr Liana Cipcigan and Prof Nick Jenkins from the School of Engineering.

More technical details about this paper are available at IEEE Explore: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7765642/

Mazin T Muhssin, Liana M Cipcigan, Nick Jenkins, Meng Cheng, Zeyad A Obaid, Modelling of a population of Heat Pumps as a Source of load in the Great Britain power system, IEEE International Conference on Smart Systems and Technologies, Croatia, 12-14 October 2016.