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Various forecasting tools, based on historical data, exist for planners of national networks that are very effective in planning national interventions to ensure energy security, and meet carbon obligations over the long term. However, at a local community level, where energy demand patterns may significantly differ from the national picture, planners would be unable to justify local and more appropriate intervention due to the lack of appropriate planning tools. In this research, a new methodology is presented that initially creates a virtual community of households in a small community based on a survey of a similar community, and then predicts the energy behaviour of each household, and hence of the community. It is based on a combination of the statistical data, and a questionnaire survey. The methodology therefore enables realistic predictions and can help local planners decide on measures such as embedding renewable energy and demand management. Using the methodology developed, a study has been carried out in order to understand the patterns of electricity consumption within UK households. The methodology developed in this study has been used to investigate the incentives currently available to consumers to see if it would be possible to shift some of the load from peak hours. Furthermore, the possibility of using renewable energy (RE) at community level is also studied and the results presented. Real time pricing information was identified as a barrier to understanding the effectiveness of various incentives and interventions. A new pricing criteria has therefore been developed to help developers and planners of local communities to understand the cost of intervention. Conclusions have been drawn from the work. Finally, suggestions for future work have been presented.

The aim of this study is to analysis, investigate and find out the solutions for the problems associated with the implementations of antennas RFID Reader and Tag for various applications. In particular, the efficiency of the RFID reader antenna and the detection range of the RFID tag antenna, subject to a small and compact antenna's design configuration have been studied. The present work has been addressed directly to reduce the cost, size and increase the detection range and communication reliability of the RFID framework antennas. Furthermore, the modelling concept of RFID passive tags mounted on various materials including the novel design of RFID reader antenna using Genetic Algorithm (GA) are considered and discussed to maintain reliable and efficient antenna radiation performances. The main benefit of applying GA is to provide fast, accurate and reliable solutions of antenna's structure. Therefore, the GA has been successfully employed to design examples: meander-line, two linear cross elements and compact Helical- Spiral antennas. In addition, a hybrid method to model the human body interaction with RFID tag antenna operating at 900MHz has been studied. The near field distribution and the radiation pattern together with the statistical distribution of the radiation efficiency and the absorbed power in terms of cumulative distribution functions for different orientation and location of RFID's tag antenna on the human body have been demonstrated. Several tag antennas wi th symmetrical and unsymmetrical structure configurations operating in the European UHF band 850-950 MHz have been fabricated and tested. . The measured and simulated results have been found to be in a good agreement with reasonable impedance matching to the typical input impedance of an RFID integrated circuit chip and nominal power gain and radiation patterns.

In order to identify the weakest bus in a power system so that the Unified Power Flow Controller could be connected, an investigation of static and dynamic voltage stability is presented. Two stability indices, static and dynamic, have been proposed in the thesis. Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) analysis has been used for the dynamic stability analysis. Results based on the Western System Coordinate Council (WSCC) 3-machine, 9-bus test system and IEEE 14 bus Reliability Test System (RTS) shows that these indices detect with the degree of accuracy the weakest bus, the weakest line and the voltage stability margin in the test system before suffering from voltage collapse. Recently, Flexible Alternating Current Transmission systems (FACTs) have become significant due to the need to strengthen existing power systems. The UPFC has been identified in literature as the most comprehensive and complex FACTs equipment that has emerged for the control and optimization of power flow in AC transmission systems. Significant research has been done on the UPFC. However, the extent of UPFC capability, connected to the weakest bus in maintaining the power flows under fault conditions, not only in the line where it is installed, but also in adjacent parallel lines, remains to be studied. In the literature, it has normally been assumed the UPFC is disconnected during a fault period. In this investigation it has been shown that fault conditions can affect the UPFC significantly, even if it occurred on far buses of the power system. This forms the main contribution presented in this thesis. The impact of UPFC in minimizing the disturbances in voltages, currents and power flows under fault conditions are investigated. The WSCC 3-machine, 9-bus test system is used to investigate the effect of an unsymmetrical fault type and position on the operation of UPFC controller in accordance to the G59 protection, stability and regulation. Results show that it is necessary to disconnect the UPFC controller from the power system during unsymmetrical fault conditions.

This thesis investigates the problem of sensors used with mobile robots. Firstly, a colour sensor is considered, for its ability to detect objects having the three primary colours Red, Green and Blue (RGB). Secondly, an accelerometer was investigated, from which velocity was derived from the raw data using numerical integration. The purpose of the design and development of the sensors was to use them for robotic navigation and collision avoidance. This report presents the results of experiments carried out on the colour sensor and the accelerometer. A discussion of the results and some conclusions are also presented. It proved feasible to achieve the goal of detecting colours successfully but only for a limited distance. The accelerometer proved reliable but is not yet being applied in real time. Both the colour sensor and the accelerometer proved to be inexpensive. Some recommendations are made to improve both the colour sensor and the accelerometer sensors.