Search

Battery energy storage is being installed behind-the-meter to reduce electrical bills while improving power system efficiency and resiliency. This paper demonstrates the development and application of an advanced optimal control method for battery energy storage systems to maximize these benefits. We combine methods for accurately modeling the state-of-charge, temperature, and state-of-health of lithium-ion battery cells into a model predictive controller to optimally schedule charge/discharge, air-conditioning, and forced air convection power to shift a electric customer's consumption and hence reduce their electric bill. While linear state-of-health models produce linear relationships between battery usage and degradation, a non-linear, stress-factor model accounts for the compounding improvements in lifetime that can be achieved by reducing several stress factors at once. Applying this controller to a simulated system shows significant benefits from cooling-in-the-loop control and that relatively small sacrifices in bill reduction performance can yield large increases in battery life. This trade-off function is highly dependent on the battery's degradation mechanisms and what model is used to represent them.

Background-oriented schlieren is a method of visualizing refractive disturbances by comparing digital images with and without a refractive disturbance distorting a background pattern. Traditionally, backgrounds consist of random distributions of high-contrast color transitions or speckle patterns. To image a refractive disturbance, a digital image correlation algorithm is used to identify the location and magnitude of apparent pixel shifts in the background pattern between the two images. Here, a novel method of using color gradient backgrounds is explored as an alternative that eliminates the need to perform a complex image correlation between the digital images. A simple image subtraction can be used instead to identify the location, magnitude, and direction of the image distortions. Gradient backgrounds are demonstrated to provide quantitative data only limited by the camera’s pixel resolution, whereas speckle backgrounds limit resolution to the size of the random pattern features and image correlation window size. Quantitative measurement of density in a thermal boundary layer is presented. Two-dimensional gradient backgrounds using multiple colors are demonstrated to allow measurement of two-dimensional refractions. A computer screen is used as the background, which allows for rapid modification of the gradient to tune sensitivity for a particular application.