The University of Cyprus (UCY) is the leading university (> 7,000 students) and the most active research institution in Cyprus (European Research Rankings). UCY is one of the few organizations in Cyprus holding the EFQM “Committed to Excellence” award and acknowledged with the “HR Excellence in Research” logo. It delivers up to 350 externally funded research projects, including several FP7 and H2020 projects, 10 ERC Grants and national and regional research programs funded by the National Research Promotion Foundation and the European Structural Funds.

 

The KIOS CoE is a large research center within the University of Cyprus. The Center boasts a critical mass of researchers with expertise in applied and industrial-geared research and innovation, particularly in the area of intelligent monitoring, management, and safety of critical infrastructure systems. The Center concentrates on infrastructures related to energy and power, telecommunications, water resources, and transportation. The KIOS CoE has secured more than 57 research funded programs, totaling over 10 million euros from EU funding. Furthermore, the KIOS CoE has received the extremely competitive H2020 Teaming funding, as part of the EU’s strategic program “Spreading Excellence and Widening Participation – Teaming”, securing funding in excess of 40 million euros for the period of 2017-2022. The power and energy group of the KIOS CoE will be involved in this project. The team has demonstrated pioneering research on grid integration of renewables, wide area monitoring and control of power systems, advanced control techniques of power electronics converters, power quality and stability, and smart grid.

The KIOS CoE offers access to the Power Systems Pilot Site with state-of-the-art equipment for modeling, simulating, and emulating energy systems, both at the building level and at the grid level (225 kW wind turbine, 5 kW photovoltaic systems, 6 kW flywheel based kinetic battery, 40 kW fuel cells, 80 kW electrolyzer, and hydrogen storage). The power systems laboratory enables real-time investigations of power systems in a Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) framework. The laboratory has the unique capability of performing advanced and realistic studies of real power systems (including generation plants, transmission and distribution grids, wind and PV power plants, storage systems, consumers and prosumers, and power electronics based converters) in real-time. The laboratory will be used to test and validate the control scheme designs proposed in the project in a real-time HIL framework. Such equipment will be useful to test and validate the control algorithms proposed during the project period.