Manohar Chamana, Ph.D.

Research Interests

My future research goals are to continue and expand my research work on large scale adoption of clean energy in electric power grid. Following are specific areas of interests:

• Volt-VAR Operations – Modeling offline/online tools to enable the coordinated operation of regulating devices and DERs, including energy storage, PV, wind, and flexible buildings for varying conditions. Develop new control strategies to mitigate high penetrations of PV solar and wind by focusing on the coordination among different regulating devices.
• Advanced Distribution management system (ADMS) – Testbed development by modeling the electrical network in a software environment, to reduce the R&D costs before field deployment. Utilize real-time simulators/hardware testbeds to perform interconnection studies while performing hardware testing to investigate system impacts.
• Microgrids and Hybrid Plants– Key modeling gaps include dynamic models of DER controls and hardware needed to ensure a reliable transition between grid-connected and islanded modes, including black-start. Additionally, adaptive control and protection schemes need to be researched for microgrid/hybrid plant operation in grid-connected and island modes. Finally, investigate optimization techniques, energy/demand management, and planning of distributed energy resources. I worked on a project to perform microgrid operations for power regulation for an islanded operation based on operation time in a day.
• Load, Wind, and PV Profile Analysis– I have worked on a technique to extract the variability information from distribution transformer historical data sets by applying frequency-based transforms. The expected similar load profiles were grouped and decomposed using discrete wavelet transform. A classification technique was applied to cluster groups with similar variability by observing the strong correlation coefficients among the rapid-refresh histograms.
• Cyber-Physical Security of Advanced Distribution Networks, Wind Farms, and Microgrids– With increasing communication layers in the electrical networks, the number of access points for cyber-attacks has increased significantly at the grid edge. As a result, the communication architecture has moved from centralized to decentralized and distributed architectures at various layers. In addition, an increase in sensing instruments and control devices has increased the vulnerability in the electrical grid. By modeling power system components on a real-time simulator and the communications components on the network system simulator, studies will be performed to mitigate wind farm cyber-physical vulnerabilities.

Education

• 2016: Ph.D. IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, NC; Dissertation: “Utilizing Smart Inverter Capabilities for Management of High Renewable Distributed Generation Integration in Active Distribution Networks”.                                        

• 2011: M.S. IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX; Thesis: “Modeling and Control of Directly Connected and Inverter Interfaced Sources in a Microgrid”.

• 2009: B.E. IN ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING, Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, India. 

Courses Taught

Awards & Honors

• 2021 National Wind Institute's Faculty Innovation Award ($500)
• TTU 10 years of service pin
• N.C. Charlotte's Energy Production and Infrastructure Center (EPIC) Scholarship 2013-14
• IEEE PES T&D 2014, one of the best papers selected for presentation