Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Smart cities are offering interconnected and smart infrastructures with flexible services to all occupants and visitors during normal and emergency situations. Energy is an important component that enables the development of residential, industrial, transportation, commercial, and public infrastructures. It is important to design hybrid energy systems that can provide adequate and efficient energy supply to meet demand profiles from electricity, thermal, gas, as well as other energy conversion schemes to support transportation, water, waste, and other infrastructures. The variability of energy resources in different regions mobilized researchers to investigate practical designs of hybrid energy systems and technologies based on distributed energy resources, storage, and loads for electricity, thermal, and gas networks in view of possible conversions and interfaces with infrastructures and their associated load profiles. This research program will investigate engineering design to develop and integrate hybrid energy systems with water, transportation, and waste infrastructures, with different loads and demand profiles. Computational intelligence techniques will be linked to physical system models, and will be used to analyze design data, simulation models, and real time data to optimize the overall performance of hybrid energy systems based on key performance indicators. In order to ensure practical deployment of hybrid energy systems, it is important to integrate resiliency analysis with different components as part of the engineering design, with the considerations of extreme weather conditions, pandemic situations, and harsh environment for interconnected infrastructures under different severe conditions. As smart cities are moving towards smart interconnected infrastructures of transportation, water, food, health, waste, and recreational, it is important to study engineering design to integrate resilient hybrid energy systems in view of the integrated energy requirements. The research will include analysis of coupling among different domains, which will support the engineering design and operation of the integration among energy systems and other interconnected infrastructures. Due to the complexity of the multiple domains of interconnected infrastructures, it is important to design unified interface systems to systematically integrate energy systems with other domains. The modular and unified interfaces with standardized logic will support the engineering design and integration among energy systems and other cycles. The interface design will include functions of transportation, material movement, thermal energy, electric energy, gas flow, food, waste, health, environmental, water, and social cycles, as well as policies, with data interfaces.