Adapting to mediation online: the Irish experience

This article contrasts the use of online mediation in Ireland from February 2019, prior to the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, and from then until March 2021. It considers the context for online mediation in Ireland, the challenges to the mediation process, the experience of online mediation from the perspectives of mediators and participants in mediation. Sharing these experiences informs future decisions as to how technology might best be integrated into mediation practice in the longer term. The experience of 13 mediators indicates that there are challenges due to familiarity with technology for mediators and participants, and challenges to power balancing and confidentiality. In Ireland, although platforms such as Zoom played a major role, use of the telephone in the mediation process also increased. An online mediation competence framework for mediators is proposed.

Distributed Control Strategy of Single-Phase Battery Systems for Compensation of Unbalanced Active Powers in a Three-Phase Four-Wire Microgrid

Unbalanced active powers can affect power quality and system reliability due to high penetration and uneven allocation of single-phase photovoltaic (PV) rooftop systems and load demands in a three-phase four-wire microgrid. This paper proposes a distributed control strategy to alleviate the unbalanced active powers using distributed single-phase battery storage systems. In order to balance the unbalanced active powers at the point of common coupling (PCC) in a distributed manner, the agents (households’ single-phase battery storage systems) must have information on the active powers and phases. Inspired by supervised learning, a clustering approach was developed to use labels in order to match the three-phase active powers at the PCC with the agents’ phases. This enables the agent to select the correct active power data from the three-phase active powers. Then, a distributed power balancing control strategy is applied by all agents to compensate the unbalanced active powers. Each agent calculates the average grid power based on information received from its neighbours so that all agents can then cooperatively operate in either charging or discharging modes to achieve the compensation. As an advantage, the proposed distributed control strategy offers the battery owners flexibility to participate in the strategy. Case studies comparing performance of local, centralized, and the proposed distributed strategy on a modified IEEE-13-bus test system with real household PV powers and load demands are provided.

POWER BALANCING TOPOLOGY FIVE-LEVEL CASCADED H-BRIDGE INVERTER WITH PHASE SHIFT TECHNIQUE FOR PHOTOVOLTAIC SOURCES

This research paper proposes a power balance optimization topology for a five-level cascaded H-bridge inverter with a phase shift technique. This topology uses two phase-shifted sine waveforms 180 degrees apart to modulate the two triangular waveforms. These two triangular waveforms are assigned a 90-degree phase shift. When the outputs of the two H-bridge inverters are connected in series, the total output waveform is 5 levels. The principles and methods of this research will focus on a cascaded H-bridge inverter with photovoltaic sources. Two independent units are connected in series to allow linear and non-linear loads at a maximum one-kilowatt rating. However, the researcher will create a prototype mechanism to test the power balance and power distribution efficiency of the two inverters compared with the simulation results using MATLAB/Simulink. Nevertheless, the results showed that the power balance efficiency could be improved, resulting in the mean efficiency of both inverters of 96%. When the harmonics were measured, the load was not Linear produced third- and fifth-order harmonics greater than linear load. This research confirms that the simulation with MATLAB/Simulink program and the prototype is correct and acceptable.

Improved LEACH protocol for increasing the lifetime of WSNs

<p>Recently, wireless sensor network (WSN) is taking a high place in several applications: military, industry, and environment. The importance of WSNs in current applications makes the WSNs the most developed technology at the research level and especially in the field of communication and computing. However, WSN’s performance deals with a number of challenges. Energy consumption is the most considerable for many researchers because nodes use energy to collect, treat, and send data, but they have restricted energy. For this reason, numerous efficient energy routing protocols have been developed to save the consumption of power. Low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) is considered as the most attractive one in WSNs. In the present document, we evaluate the LEACH approach effectiveness in the cluster-head (CH) choosing and in data transmission, then we propose an enhanced protocol. The proposed algorithm aims to improve energy consumption and prolong the lifetime of WSN through selecting CHs depending on the remaining power, balancing the number of nodes in clusters, determining abandoned nodes in order to send their data to the sink. Then CHs choose the optimal path to achieve the sink. Simulation results exhibit that the enhanced method can decrease the consumption of energy and prolong the life-cycle of the network.</p>