Development of smart plug for energy management system in smart grid

Today, the importance of energy effiency studies, energy efficient applications and products has been on the rise. In these studies aim that the main goal of efficient and economic use of generated energy with consider consumer demand. Recently, ideas like smart cities, smart buildings and smart homes has been widely used under smart grid concept. With smart grid infrastructure, it will be possible to monitor electrical demand of a residential customer and control each electricity generation center for more efficient energy flow. The subcomponent of the smart grid can be considered as smart homes. Better utilization of the electrical grid can be achieved through the communication of the smart home with both other customers in the grid and appliances in the house itself since generation can effectively be scheduled by having more precise demand data. Smart plugs are used for the communication with the household appliances in the house. Although there are various prodcuts and appliacations under smart plug concept, smart plug is mainly defined as a product that monitors consumed energy and power parameters with the possibility of turning the device on or off with a control signal from a distant location. Smart plug samples are applied in different places of the world. With this thesis, a novel national smart plug with wireless communication protocol will be designed and manufactured in Turkey. Main communication protocols are used for monitoring and control actions with the smart plug are ZigBee, Power Line ZigBee is IEEE 808.15.4 based international communication protocols for wireless communication. Since both cost and energy consumption of ZigBee enabled device is low compared to other wireless communication products. On that sense ZigBee communication protocol is good for home applications/products. Whole smart plugs inside a building/house will use ZigBee protocol for communication and a central unit (Master Unit) will be used for ZigBee-Computer integration. The central unit will be used for monitoring, control actions, and communication with all of the smart plugs. The developed smart plug will also have plug and play properties so that it can be used not only in new buildings/homes but in old buildings/homes as well. The developed smart plug will be superior to smart plugs on foreign markets since the developed smart plug can determine abnormal, for example overcurrent or overvoltage, operation of the plugged device based on the pre-loaded device information. Thus, failure of the plugged device can be prevented. In this respect, the developed smart plug will be is a novel patentable product. The smart plug will be developed by the collaborative work of VIKO and Yıldız Technical University Electrical Engineering Deparment and will be a part of VIKO products on the market. In addition, the developed smart plug will be tested in the existing research-test oriented smart house in our university. Contributions of the project can be summarized as: A national smart plug will be developed for the first time in Turkey. The developed plug will be a subsitition of imported plugs and thus will contribute to the Turkish economy. Technological background for future products for smart buildings, smart homes and smart grid will be acquried.