Power Quality and Demand-side Management: Concepts, Technologies and Case Studies - Dr. Joaquin Garrido-Zafra

Abstract - This seminar is organized as follows. The first section introduces the definition of power quality and demand-side management concepts, providing a classification of power quality disturbances and demand response programs. Then, the second part examines the glass melting process as a case study in the industrial sector in which demand-side management and power quality are closely interconnected. Starting with the study of power control methods and thermal considerations in electric heating applications, a load scheduling strategy is proposed for this energy-intensive industry. Subsequently, electronic devices developed for power quality monitoring and direct control of the loads are presented, providing their capabilities and examples of how they operate under scenarios where limits established by international power quality standards are exceeded, either due to voltage sags and swells or to high levels of total harmonic distortion of the voltage or individual current harmonic magnitudes. Finally, the seminar concludes with an overview of ongoing research and projects that apply this technology.

Bio: Dr. Joaquin Garrido-Zafra received his B.Sc. degree in Industrial Electronics Engineering and his M.Sc. degree in Distributed Renewable Energies from the University of Córdoba (Spain) in 2017 and 2018, respectively. In 2022, he completed his PhD under the program Advanced Computing, Energy and Plasmas with the thesis entitled “Research on demand-side flexibility in Smart Grids: direct load control” from the same university. He is also a Professor at the Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering of the University of Cordoba and a member of the Industrial Electronics and Instrumentation (IEI) research group. He has participated in several national and international R&D projects funded through competitive public calls. Dr. Garrido-Zafra is the author or co-author of over 25 scientific contributions with more than 270 citations, including conference papers, book chapters and journal articles. His research interests are demand-side management (DSM), as one of the main mechanisms providing flexibility to the power system, and power quality (PQ), with particular attention to power system harmonics. More specifically, he develops solutions, energy optimization problems, and electronic embedded systems used under the smart grid paradigm.