InnoBlog: Contributing to energy transition through my master’s thesis

At the end of an EIT InnoEnergy Master’s degree, students of different programmes pursue their master’s thesis on a topic related to their field. The master’s thesis is an excellent opportunity to immerse oneself in an area of interest and start contributing to research or exploring business opportunities.

Choosing a topic for the master’s thesis

Different universities have different procedures for the master’s thesis, where some students choose from a list of suggested research topics, while other universities offer more freedom. The thesis can often be performed either at the university or with a research institution or company.

I recently graduated from the EIT InnoEnergy Master’s in Smart Electrical Networks and Systems, and I did my second year at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. Largely to the services provided by the Career Centre for EIT InnoEnergy students, I got the opportunity to perform my thesis with Siemens Energy. I also had the freedom to choose my topic (as long as it was linked to my line of studies, naturally).

What is ‘SSO’?

During some research for a school project, I came over an interesting phenomenon. I read about the occurrence of “Sub-Synchronous Oscillations”, abbreviated “SSO” which was reported to cause trouble in some electrical grids. The electrical grid has a normal operating frequency of 50 Hz in Europe, referred to as the synchronous frequency. Sub-synchronous oscillations are interactions that occur at a lower frequency than the synchronous frequency, typically in the range of 3-45 Hz. If some of these oscillations are poorly damped or occur at resonant frequencies, which basically mean that they start growing, electrical equipment can be damaged. These oscillations can be detected by processing data that is gathered from the power system, referred to as signal processing, which was a field a wanted to work with.

Together with my mentors at the company , I decided to develop a detection tool for such oscillations, aiming to detect potential SSO before it becomes detrimental. To this end, I investigated how machine learning could be used to enhance the approaches used for SSO detection. After five months’ work, I had developed a real-time monitoring tool which could identify SSO and applied machine learning to analyse and improve the SSO detection.

Contributing to the energy transition

But, for many, I realise this may sound like a geeky corner of electrical engineering for maths enthusiasts with no obvious practical implications. However, interest in SSO has been increasing lately since this disturbance in the grid can be caused by a high penetration of renewable energy resources. It follows that, to make the energy transition possible, we need an electrical grid which can cope with a changing energy system. We need an electrical infrastructure which supports renewable energy technologies.

Innovation is needed across all energy fields, now more urgently than ever. With the variety of EIT InnoEnergy masters you can focus on the area where you want to make an impact, whether it is in renewable energy generation, energy storage or developing the smart cities of tomorrow.

I know what I want to do, and I am happy to have acquired the tools throughout my EIT InnoEnergy journey to develop the electrical infrastructure and work with technologies that will make our energy system more sustainable.

By Maria Isabel Bang Jensen, EIT InnoEnergy Master School alumna