Christian A. Hans is doctoral candidate at the chair of Control Systems ("Fachgebiet Regelungssysteme") of Prof. Raisch at TU Berlin. His research interest focuses on consensus-based operational management of microgrids.
Christian studied electrical engineering (Diploma) at RWTH Aachen University and at the UPM in Madrid. There he mainly dealt with generation, transport and storage of electrical energy from renewable sources. Working as a student research assistant at Prof. Sauer's and Prof. De Doncker's institute he is familiar with power electronics, applied control engineering and electrochemical storage systems. Supervised by Prof. Moser he turned his attention to the destabilizing effect of photovoltaic generators in weak electrical grids in his final thesis. Since 2010 he is engaged in control engineering issues in island networks at Younicos AG, Berlin.
"Consensus-Based Operational Management of Microgrids"
Due to the steady growth of decentralized distributed generation, the operational management of microgrids is becoming an increasing challenge to meet: How to create a system management of grids with a high proportion of renewable energy in a way that is stable and robust to perturbations?
A promising approach to this question is a distributed optimisation with the help of consensus algorithms. The plants and not a centralized control decide in a cooperative manner on the operational management of the grid. This decentralized management promises a higher degree of fault tolerance, robustness and scalability. In case of communication or control errors only the faulty parts of the grid and not the whole network will fail. Furthermore the integration of new equipment would be possible without the fault-prone adoption of the existing control, but in a plug-and-play kind of way.
It is to investigate under which conditions the expected advantages of consensus-based operational management come to bear. The results gained shall later be transferred to larger power networks.