Student Name: Sunil Srinivasa Manjanbail Rao, PhD

Email address: rsunilsr@asu.edu

 

Background and Research Interests:

“Currently, I am a PhD student at the SenSIP Lab, Arizona State University.

I worked as a Research Associate in the Electrical Department at PES School of Engineering from 2013-2015 after having completed by BE degree in 2013.

My research mainly lies in the field of Machine Learning and Signal Processing with applications related to fault detection in PV Modules. Monitoring utility-scale solar arrays was shown to minimize cost of maintenance and help optimize the performance of the array under various conditions. An 18kW experimental facility that consists of 104 panels is fitted with smart monitoring devices. Each of these devices embeds sensors, wireless transceivers, and relays that enable continuous monitoring, fault detection, and real-time connection topology changes. The facility enables networked data exchanges via the use of wireless data sharing with servers, fusion and control centres, and mobile devices.”

 
Research Work

Monitoring utility-scale solar arrays was shown to minimize cost of maintenance and help optimize the performance of the array under various conditions. We have designed an 18kW experimental facility that consists of 104 panels fitted with smart monitoring devices. Each of these devices embeds sensors, wireless transceivers, and relays that enable continuous monitoring, fault detection, and real-time connection topology changes. The facility enables networked data exchanges via the use of wireless data sharing with servers, fusion and control centers, and mobile devices. We are using Machine Learning and Deep Learning custom algorithms for detection and identification of commonly occurring faults and shaded conditions in utility scale PV arrays.

Research Picture: 

Publications: 

1. S Adithya, Sunil Rao, C Mahima, S Vishnu, Mythri Thippareddy, V Ramasubramanian, “Template based techniques for automatic segmentation of TTS unit database”, ICASSP, Shanghai 2016.
2. S. Katoch, G. Muniraju, S. Rao, A. Spanias, P. Turaga, C. Tepedelenlioglu, M. Banavar, D. Srinivasan, “Shading Prediction, Fault Detection, and Consensus Estimation for Solar Array Control”, 1st IEEE International Conference on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS-2018), Saint. Petersburg, Russia, May 2018.
3. G. Muniraju, S. Rao, S. Katoch, A. Spanias, P. Turaga, C. Tepedelenlioglu, M. Banavar, D. Srinivasan, “A Cyber-Physical Photovoltaic Array Monitoring and Control System”, International Journal of Monitoring and Surveillance Technologies Research, vol., issue 3, May 2018.
4. S. Rao, S. Katoch, P. Turaga, A. Spanias, C. Tepedelenlioglu, R. Ayyanar, H. Braun, J. Lee, U. Shanthamallu, M. Banavar, and D. Srinivasan, “A Cyber-Physical System Approach for Photovoltaic Array Monitoring and Control,” in Proc. IEEE IISA 2017, Larnaca, Cyprus, 2017.
5. Farib Khondoker, Sunil Rao, Andreas Spanias, Cihan Tepedelenlioglu, “Photovoltaic Array Simulation and Fault Prediction Via Multilayer Perceptron Models”, Proc. IEEE IISA 2018, Zakynthos, Greece, 2018.
6. Sunil Rao, David Ramirez, Henry Braun, Jongmin Lee, Cihan Tepedelenlioglu, Elias Kyriakides, Devarajan Srinivasan, Jeffrey Frye, Shinji Koizumi, Yoshitaka Morimoto and Andreas Spanias, “An 18 kW Solar Array Research Facility for Fault Detection Experiments”, MELECON, Cyprus, April 2016.
7. Uday Shankar Shanthamallu, Sunil Rao, Abhinav Dixit, Vivek S. Narayanswamy, Jie Fan and Andreas Spanias, “Introducing Machine Learning in Undergraduate Classes”, ICASSP 2019 (submitted.)
8. Sunil Rao, C Mahima, S Vishnu, S Adithya, A Sricharan, V Ramasubramanian, “TTS evaluation: Double-ended objective quality measures”, IEEE International Conference on Electronics, Computing and Communication Technologies (CONECCT), Bangalore, 2015.
9. Mythri T, Aditya S, C Mahima, Sunil Rao, V Ramasubramanian, “titleG2P-Free grapheme-to-speech synthesis: UTF-8 based automatic unit database annotation and mixed Viterbi unit-selection”, International Committee for the Co-ordination and Standardization of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques, Shanghai, 2015.
10. KV Karthik, M Dinesh Kumar, MS Sunil Rao, Channabasava Nucchha, Subhash Kulkarni, “Novel Signatures for Gait Analysis Using Level Sets”, Fifth International Conference on Signal and Image Processing (ICSIP), Bangalore, 2014.

 
Acknowledgements: 

This work is supported in part by the NSF GOALI award 1308052, the NSF REV GOALI supplement 1450616, Poundra LLC, ViaSOL Inc, and Energy Wireless (Japan).

In addition to the NSF GOALI and industrial awards for research, we appreciate the logistical and financial support of ASU SenSIP, ECEE, IAFSE, MTW, and OKED in planning the construction of the solar panel monitoring facility.