Scope and Objectives

Rapidly growing energy demand has lead to poor quality of service (black-outs, brown-outs, and load-shedding), depletion of resources and impact on the environment. These concerns are addressed by developing solutions for: - reducing consumption by adopting occupancy and need-based appliance usage and - flattening peaks by applying timely demand-response strategies including scheduling and resource allocation. We exploit learnings from our prior work and extend its scope through further elaboration and experimentation. One highlight of our solution approach is that it makes minimal use of physical sensors by employing additional (soft sensing) resources, introducing the principle of observability.

Deliverables

1) Building robust and deployable smart energy solutions for effective and efficient real-time response management.
2) Study the thermal aspects of large meeting space for deciding the HVAC set-points, the effect of air circulation in the space, the rate of cooling /heating in that space, and consequently the energy requirements of the space.
3) Enlighten the users about their power usage through user feedback while preserving user data privacy.
4) Design a visualization portal which can explain the real-time temperature, power consumption dynamics of the KReSIT building, to be accessed by all. Train model to detect occupant, implement Real-Time Zoning in the existing environment of the Smart Classroom complex
5) Develop a Building Energy Management Framework which can be applied to any building - a Smart Building Management System (BMS) that provides deeper insights about a building. The Smart BMS will use a holistic view of buildings using minimum number of physical sensors. The BMS will be designed to take actions in a timely manner based on sophisticated analytics.

Videos

Scientific Output

1. Smart door implemented for user identity and count gives good accuracies is inexpensive and does not require user intervention. Attempts are being made to further reduce the hardware footprint by replacing lasers with ultrasonic sensors for entry-exit events and increasing the sensor resolution and by working on an ergonomically favourable design. It has a scalable with plug and play software architecture and can be used with different sensors to monitor buildings with varied occupancy profiles

2. Studies have been done in large meeting spaces keeping in mind the nature of the space, its size and shape, orientation of walls, thermal capacitance, the ambient temperature, the desired climate condition for the space, inside temperature humidity, the energy consumption role of each appliance in the space which in turn may depend on how the appliances are being utilized. Based on the above observations, a systematic framework is developed for an effective HVAC strategy to save energy. Proposed strategies include pre-cooling of the spaces early shut off of HVACs during certain periods of non-occupancy, coupled with energy-conscious seating policy zoning of spaces savings of up to 30% can be achieved. Dividing the space into different zones and then performing zone based cooling gave better thermal comfort and reduction in power consumption. Observed values across different locations within the hall show a temperature gradient indicating the non-uniform distribution of temperature in the space. Hence we need to design interventions for uniform distribution of air within the hall

3. The latest version of the SCC setup uses Smart Sensor Suit which is a combination of different off the shelf hardware modules which communicate with each other wirelessly to make SMART decisions in a particular situation in a given environment. The sensor generates an interrupt only when there is a considerable change in the value of the parameter it is sensing. When the sensed parameter remains constant the microcontroller and communication modules go into Deep Sleep Mode, hence reducing the power consumption drastically without losing meaningful data

4.A visualization portal is developed to enable interactive exploration of sensor data which reflects per capita consumption contributors to base load and user device interactions etc.

5. A Smart BMS is under development that provides a holistic view of the building while providing a one-stop interface for monitoring, controlling and accessing various devices within the building. The BMS backend employs data streaming, archival data management, and query processing techniques for faster analytics. The access control system is customized based on operator privileges and location

6.An Android application for measuring ambient temperature has been developed. This novel approach employs our principle of minimal and non-intrusive sensing using the ubiquitous mobile Smartphone as a temperature sensing device eliminating the need for deploying additional sensing infrastructure

Results and outcome till date

1. Prototype of Smart Meter is ready and soon installed in the field for trial.
2. Development of Portal for the Building Management System in partly completed in the context of remote operation for HVACs in Smart Class Room Complex with secured access control. Novels feature in BMS have been planned for implementation.
3. Demostration in academic class rooms in IIT Bombay is done for further replications.
4. Mobile App for climate comfort seating arrangement is under development for Large spaces.
5. Experiment for envisaging the SMART phones for measuring the temperature of ambiance towards Novel feature have been carried out recently.
6. Lab based prototype for SMART door for predicting the occupancy is under development.
7.Using real traces of electricity consumption and solar PV generation profiles, a set of algorithmic solutions are evaluated for using energy storage i.e. battery. Using the parameters of energy cost savings under Time-of-Use tariffs and prevailing net metering policy, breakeven periods (in years) for using a centralized battery with energy sharing will be calculated for different types of consumption profiles.
8.Prototype power boost for integrating multiple technology / transparency modules has been designed. Testing of the final circuit pending.Season wise and partial shading effect on power generation at different latitudes. Winter data logging in progress Summer is pending.

Societal benefit and impact anticipated

We are an energy deficit nation. Our rural and urban areas are reeling under severe power crisis and face long hours of power outage leading to slower growth in agricultural and industrial sectors. This means more fuel imports and costlier import bills at energy companies. It also means India's energy sector is becoming increasingly vulnerable to global supply disruptions and price volatility. Our research group at IIT-Bombay has been addressing this problem through extensive research and by applying computational techniques to save energy in buildings. Through our interventions, in an academic setup, we have been able to establish attractive energy savings of up to 58% when compared to baseline power consumption, using our SMART principle. Energy thus saved can be efficiently used for developmental purposes across sectors leading to better quality of life for our citizens.

Next steps

Since few of the research products are tested and demonstrated as a prototype, steps are taken towards Technology transfer and business model development programs. It is planned to implement SMART solutions in some other academic institues in Mumbai.

Publications and reports

1. Rohit Gupta & Krithi Ramamritham. 2018. Extracting the Full Potential of Voltage. In e Energy 2018 International Conference on Future Energy Systems, June 12 to 15, 2018, Karlsruhe, Germany. ACM New York, NY, USA
2. Gopinath Karmakar, Uddhav Arote, Anshul Agarwal, and Krithi Ramamritham. 2018. Adaptive Hybrid Approaches to Thermal Modeling of Building. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Future Energy Systems e Energy 18. ACM New York, USA
3. Vivek Kuthanazhi, Santhosh Jois, Krithi Ramamritham, and Anil Kottantharayil. 2018. Meeting Mid-Day Peak Loads through Distributed Rooftop PV Systems Tale of Two Cities. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Future Energy Systems e Energy 2018. ACM, New York,USA
4. Shaunak Manurkar, Krithi Ramamritham, and SEIL Team. 2018. Building IoT nodes a flexible approach poster abstract. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks IPSN 2018. IEEE Press, Piscataway USA
5. Ramamritham K, Karmakar G, Shenoy P. (2017) Smart Energy Management A Computational Approach. In Reddy P, Sureka A , Chakravarthy S, Bhalla S. Big Data Analytics. BDA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10721. Springer Cham

Patents

Few Patents are in pipeline

Scholars and Project Staff

Project Staff 1) Ankit Deogharkar 2) Gowri Ramasubramaniyam 3) Jay Joshi 4) Chaitra Bahuman 5) Priyanka M Mammen 6) Niveditha Somu 7) Shaunak Manurkar 8) Bhushan Kadam 9) Aisha Bharbhare (Partially on IMPRINT) Their tenure is presently upto 31st March 2019 Scholars/Students 1) Hareesh Kumar 2) Ayush Goyal Student's tenure is up to 31st May 2019.

Challenges faced

Other information

Contacts have been made with different Corporate and industry for partnering our research work as a part of Technology Transfer.