Domestic Electrical Appliances Research Articles

Affordability of electricity to rural consumers in Tanzania: An elephant in the room?

Affordability of electricity in rural areas has received negligible concern, yet with equivocal information. Thus, this paper extrapolates this disregarded aspect by raising empirical debates on the affordability of electricity connection and consumption while also predicting the factors of domestic electrical appliances among rural consumers. Affordability of electricity connection was measured by a catastrophic approach through the index of utility Price Income Ratio (PIR) at a threshold of 10%. Consumption affordability was estimated through PIR at a 5% share of household income, coupled with a monthly basic electricity consumption of 30 kWh per household. A multiple regression model was adopted to determine electrical appliance ownership in the household. The paper reveals that electricity connection was not affordable to consumers in the lowest income quintile (61.76%), who spent up to 33% of their income. On consumption, electricity was affordable as consumers spent no more than 5% of their household income. Moreover, the paper explains that electricity affordability and the desire for wellbeing motivate consumers to use domestic electrical appliances. Measuring the affordability of energy has a paucity in the energy literature. Thus, the paper provides insight into the present debate regarding affordability measures. Although the paper uniquely uncovers the affordability of electricity connection and consumption as prime factors for policy consideration, energy policy should also consider that affordability does not end at connection; rather, it extends to consumption. Energy policy must prioritise free technical services for rural power connection and subsidise consumption costs for the economically disadvantaged.

Peer-to-peer trading price and strategy optimization considering different electricity market types, tariff systems, and pricing models

This study investigated the peer-to-peer (P2P) trading price and strategy based on market-driven methods within a residential microgrid consists of two prosumers (i.e., P1 and P2) and one consumer (i.e., C1), which establishes a diverse microgrid trading market in terms of peer characteristics (e.g., system configurations and electrical load profile). Five cases are proposed in this study considering different electricity market types (i.e., peer-to-grid and P2P markets), retail tariff systems (i.e., progressive and time-of-use (ToU) tariff systems) as well as market-driven P2P trading pricing models (i.e., uniform and individual pricing models). Peer electrical load data are collected from three typical four-person households in Hong Kong along with their domestic electrical appliance utilization pattern. The results indicate that the individual pricing model has led to the dynamics of P2P electricity trading price than the uniform pricing model, and P2P trading is more economically efficient under the ToU tariff system. The maximum electricity bill saving of the entire microgrid can be achieved by 31.33% in summer and by 43.02% in winter. Besides, it is observed that the installation of battery energy storage system (BESS) has facilitated the self-consumption ratio of the renewable energy system to 91.98% in summer and 100% in winter. This implies that the BESS plays a pivotal role in improving the flexibility in managing the P2P trading strategy, and enhancing the efficiency in electricity dispatching within the microgrid. This study contributes to the novelty in science since it provides a comprehensive framework that can adapt to changing market conditions.

Professionalisation of home economists in Britain from the 1950s to the 1980s: mediating small domestic electrical appliances

ABSTRACT This article explores the role of home economists from the 1950s until the 1980s in relation to small domestic electrical appliances when home economists promoted these small electrical products and began to have a role in their development and evaluation. It is argued that education for home economists and their professional role developed during this period as they became mediators between producers and consumers. It captures the changing role of women in the electricity and appliance industry during the period up to the late 1980s, when the role of the home economist in these areas began to decline. Further and higher education syllabuses were developed and refined in response to the growth of employment opportunities, particularly for home economists in the electricity and appliance industry. This article therefore draws upon both a case study of the Polytechnic of North London home economics syllabuses and an oral history of Jenny Webb, a leading home economist in the electricity industry.

Repair and recycling of PCBs and their components based on obsolescence index: a domestic electrical appliances case study.

Population expansion and improving living standards, particularly in developed nations, have led to an increase in the usage of domestic electrical equipment, worldwide energy consumption, and CO2 emissions per capita. To limit the usage of non-reusable components and the amount of garbage that must be transferred at the end of a product's life cycle, longer-lasting electrical domestic appliances are a pillar of the circular economy. In recent years, the complexity of printed circuit boards (PCBs) used in the manufacture of modern electrical devices has increased, leading to an increase in device failures. This study focuses on the maintenance and recycling of domestic electrical appliance components and printed circuit boards. The proposed methodology for PCB repair is defined as a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) problem implemented in MATLAB environment and successfully tested to a variety of domestic appliances such as refrigerator, dishwasher and washing machine. The possibility of recycling metal parts of electronic components, which were replaced after PCBs' repair was also studied. Metals' percentage concentration of PCB electronic components for three customer's budgets considering metals and valuable metals recovery as given from the corresponding average metal recovery and calculated from different recycling procedures presented in the literature. The results of the proposed procedure in terms of valuable metals gave 38.4078ppm of silver. We also compared the suggested procedure with other works in terms of environmental perspective considering four measures, namely the gross energy requirement (GER), the global warming potential (GWP), the acidification potential (AP), and the solid waste burden (SWB). In terms of economic perspective and considering the existence of silver (Ag) in the electronic components, the recommended method gave comparable amount of money. Finally, a comparison of different recycling works from a technical viewpoint is also conducted. Moreover, a reparability index of domestic electrical appliances is introduced to further quantify the results of the proposed algorithm.

Remote Control of Electrical Home Appliances Using RF Module based Remote

This study examines the use of an RF-based remote system to manage domestic electrical appliances. The wireless remote control based on an RF technology can toggle the status of equipment to ON or OFF from any site without necessitating a line of sight anywhere around house. The regulating circuit is developed around a 434 MHz operational frequency RF receiver and transmitter module, along with the HT12E encoder and HT12D decoder integrated circuits and a few other passive components. The four distinct channels at the encoder end are used as switches for input signal, and the four channels at the decoder end are used as outputs points, which is connected to the respective electrical devices that are to be controlled; if the appliances are of a higher rating, the relays are used as an intermediary to connect the equipment to the receiving end of the circuit. The transmission method used in this instance is Amplitude Shift Keying (ASK), and the circuit is powered with a 9V DC battery source. The main objective of this task entails creating a closed circuit without any programming knowledge and making it functional without the need for line-of-sight utilizing RF technology. Also, as proposed development to the current working model is stated with a brief description of its functioning, which aims to efficiently control more than four electrical units using the same remote-control technology with the aid of a matrix keypad as input for switching the states of the devices, a matrix encoder & decoder for respective encoding & decoding of signals, and a stable multivibrator for circuit operations.

Introducing sufficiency in the building sector in net-zero scenarios for France

In France, the building sector (residential and commercial) represented 16% of carbon emissions in 2015 (use-phase). The building sector therefore has a major role to play in the carbon transition by acting on all available levers: sufficiency, efficiency, decarbonised energy and carbon sinks. How much can the sector contribute to the overall goal of carbon neutrality by 2050? The article presents findings from Transition(s) 2050, a set of scenarios developed for the whole economy by ADEME, the French Environmental Transition Agency. It focuses on sufficiency: which role can it play in the decarbonation of the building sector, both in the use-phase and beyond? What would enabling conditions be?Sufficiency can contribute to achieve further energy savings compared to “efficiency-only” scenarios in areas such as domestic electrical appliances or space cooling, hence easing the wider decarbonation effort. Furthermore, sufficiency has systemic implications beyond the use-phase. It contributes to decreasing energy consumption in the industrial sector, as building less has direct impact on the demand for construction material. It also has impact on other resources such as land. Land take and building waste are significantly lower in the most sufficient scenarios. However, implementing sufficiency requires profound changes both in policies for the building sector and the way these policies are designed.

Demand side energy management for smart homes using a novel learning technique–economic analysis aspects

In this study, a new distributed pattern of demand side energy management in residential smart grids regarding Improved Sparse Bayesian Learning (ISBL) method along different types of domestic electrical appliances have been presented. Considering the overall expense of electricity usage, the restrictions of supply quantity is sustained through distribution set-ups and the obtained power demands for individual appliances, the optimal energy management (OEM), for the demand side users, such as households, became an elaborated optimization issue in relation to the coupled objective performance across spatially and temporally of doubled constraints. Usually, in distributed model, figuring out of this kind of issue is problematic. Hence, in this study, we had changed it into ISBL method, and developed a distributed algorithm in order to obtain an optimal quantity of the unified OEM across the procedure of implementation. The presented scheme does not need any personal information about individual operators, meanwhile each of optimality and convergence are achieved. Additionally, this article demonstrated that the presented scheme has high robustness in unreliable communications. In addition, the suggested scheme is demonstrated and confirmed through simulations.

A Novel ILP Formulation for PCB Maintenance Considering Electrical Measurements and Aging Factors: A “Right to Repair” Approach

The design of longer-lasting products, such as domestic electric appliances, is a key-stone approach of the circular economy to reduce the use of non-reusable materials and the number of wastes to be managed at the end of the product’s life as well as to extend it. The manufacturing of modern electric appliances includes the incorporation of printed circuit boards (PCBs). PCBs provide mechanical support and electrically connect electrical or electronic components using conductive trackpads and other features etched from one or more sheet layers of copper laminated onto and/or between sheet layers of a non-conductive substrate. This paper proposes a PCB maintenance framework, fully compliant with the “Right to Repair” concept, considering the impact of their aging failures based on measurements made on them, as well as the repair and replacement costs of their components. Herein, we present an algorithm that assesses the problem of handling the repair and replacement cost corresponding to specific failures while ensuring that the total cost of repair does not exceed a predefined value. This is achieved through an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation which maximizes the benefit to the life expectancy, Li, of an appliance, constrained by a customer’s limited budget. The proposed methodology is tested with different PCBs and considers different types of appliances. More specifically, two cases concerning PCBs of washing and dishwasher machines are studied to examine the dependency of the solutions on the aging rate of their various components. The simulation results show that considering a medium budget, after 3 years, we can achieve a health benefit of 92.4% for a washing machine’s PCB, while for a dishwasher’s PCB, the health benefit drops to 86.3%.

‘On the fringe of the Technical World’: female electrical appliance demonstrators in interwar Scotland

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of female electrical appliance ‘demonstrators’ in interwar Scotland. During this period, manufacturers launched a variety of domestic electrical appliances into a consumer market already saturated with solid fuel and gas-fired equivalents. To tackle the fierce competition the electrical industry deployed female demonstrators, originally trained in domestic science, to entertain and educate audiences across Scotland. Notably, Glasgow-based demonstrators, and representatives at Scotland’s domestic science colleges, expressed an early interest in working with the Electrical Association for Women, to benefit from the organisation’s modern and empowering image. This article compares demonstrators’ understanding of the purpose of their role with the views of consumers, domestic science experts and those working in the electrical industry. An insight into the vital, yet forgotten, ‘mediating’ role which demonstrators performed between the electrical industry and consumers adds to the wider discussion about women and their participation in a male-dominated workplace throughout the interwar years.

Application of grafted cellulosic material as bioadsorbent for segregating of non-desirable content from waste water – A review

In the recent era, the industrial activities are becoming more proficient in producing the domestic material, electrical appliances, pesticide, fertilizer, detergent, leather, dyes, medicine, rubber, plastics, and several cosmetic products. During the execution of this industrial purpose, numerous kinds of hazardous metals, dyes, pollutant, micro-pollutant, organic and inorganic fragment, carcinogenic and mutagenic components are being execrated and passed into water resources (river, pond, lake) in the bulk amount. The account of this, pure water turns into the contaminated water. To removing the non-desirable content (NDC) from water, the well-known cellulose and grafted cellulose are employed as a biosorbent. Chemically treated cellulose has better quality to hold the NDC over their backbone rather than untreated cellulose. The review paper fascinates the significant tendency of grafted cellulose to substantially adsorb the hazardous metal, dyes and other non-desirable product over their backbone. This review paper also enlightened the mechanism of biosorption on the bio-sample, and studied the biosorption-feasibility parameter in applied various conditions.

A voltage and current measurement dataset for plug load appliance identification in households

This paper presents the Plug-Load Appliance Identification Dataset (PLAID), a labelled dataset containing records of the electrical voltage and current of domestic electrical appliances obtained at a high sampling frequency (30 kHz). The dataset contains 1876 records of individually-metered appliances from 17 different appliance types (e.g., refrigerators, microwave ovens, etc.) comprising 330 different makes and models, and collected at 65 different locations in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA). Additionally, PLAID contains 1314 records of the combined operation of 13 of these appliance types (i.e., measurements obtained when multiple appliances were active simultaneously). Identifying electrical appliances based on electrical measurements is of importance in demand-side management applications for the electrical power grid including automated load control, load scheduling and non-intrusive load monitoring. This paper provides a systematic description of the measurement setup and dataset so that it can be used to develop and benchmark new methods in these and other applications, and so that extensions to it can be developed and incorporated in a consistent manner.

Implementation of a Microcontroller Based Wireless Control of Domestic Electrical Appliances using the GSM Network

Implementation of a Microcontroller Based Wireless Control of Domestic Electrical Appliances using the GSM Network

Comparative Analysis of Energy Demand and CO2 Emissions on Different Typologies of Residential Buildings in Europe

The building sector accounts for one third of the global energy consumption and it is expected to grow in the next decades. This evidence leads researchers, engineers and architects to develop innovative technologies based on renewable energies and to enhance the thermal performance of building envelopes. In this context, the potential applicability and further energy performance analysis of these technologies when implemented into different building typologies and climate conditions are not easily comparable. Although massive information is available in data sources, the lack of standardized methods for data gathering and the non-public availability makes the comparative analyses more difficult. These facts limit the benchmarking of different building energy demand parameters such as space heating, cooling, air conditioning, domestic hot water, lighting and electric appliances. Therefore, the first objective of this study consists in providing a review about the common typologies of residential buildings in Europe from the main data sources. This study contains specific details on their architecture, building envelope, floor space and insulation properties. The second objective consists in performing a cross-country comparison in terms of energy demand for the applications with higher energy requirements in the residential building sector (heating and domestic hot water), as well as their related CO2 emissions. The approach of this comparative analysis is based on the residential building typology developed in TABULA/EPISCOPE projects. This comparative study provides a reference scenario in terms of energy demand and CO2 emissions for residential buildings and allows to evaluate the potential implementation of new supply energy technologies in hot, temperate and cold climate regions. From this study it was also concluded that there is a necessity of a free access database which could gather and classify reliable energy data in buildings.

Residential End-Use Energy Estimation Models in Korean Apartment Units through Multiple Regression Analysis

The aim of this study was to develop a mathematical regression model for predicting end-use energy consumption in the residential sector. To this end, housing characteristics were collected through a field survey and in-depth interviews with residents of 71 households (15 apartment complexes) in Seoul, South Korea, and annual data on end-use energy consumption were collected from measurement systems installed within each apartment unit. Based on the data collected, correlativity between the field-survey data and end-use energy consumption was analyzed, and effective independent variables from the field-survey data were selected. Regression models were developed and validated for estimating six end uses of energy consumption: heating, cooling, domestic hot water (DHW), lighting, electric appliances, and cooking. Regression analysis for ventilation was not applied, and instead a calculation formula was derived, because the energy-consumption proportion was too low. The adj-R2 of the estimation model ranged from 0.406 to 0.703, and the maximum error between measured and estimated values was around ±30%, depending on the end use.

Development of wireless and intelligent home automation system

The Intelligent Home Automation System (IHAS) is usually a cell phone web-based application that enables end users in order to keep track of in addition to manage home/office appliance using their mobile system. The main objective of this system is developed to facilitate home users, especially domestic electrical appliances with simple controls. In addition, it can save the cost of electricity for lighting can be controlled to suit the user. Generally, most home appliances controlled from a distance using a remote control. Has created a system for controlling home lighting from a certain distance, which replaces the remote control using mobile smartphone. To make the smartphone to function as a remote control, an application was developed using Android technology. App Inventor software used for designing applications intended. Hardware microcontroller Arduino UNO R3 which is used to connect the smartphone to the electrical equipment. The system has been tested by developing a mini model and take into account the situation in the domestic home. The test is based on the level of control for wirelessly using Bluetooth and the distance between the lamp and the smartphone. The results of this test, the system can be used on equipment or other home appliances for the purpose of controlling or adjustment. In addition, the security system was also highlighted in a typical system, using the global system for mobile (GSM), it can be warned and notified to the consumer where there is a gas leak or the presence of a person in the vicinity of the residence.

An alternate approach for power quality computation using sample shifting technique towards load characterization

This paper aims to estimate the pollution created by domestic electric appliances by evaluating harmonic components of electrical parameters like voltage, current, active and reactive powers and total harmonic distortions which in turn define the power quality issues. These parameters are used to create load signature pattern which is different for various appliances. Load respective signatures are analyzed for characterization to define basic electrical performances and are exploited to estimate healthiness during their running. Sample shifting technique (SST) is utilized to estimate harmonic components of the parameters. A comparatively easy to implement SST works only on the sample values and does not require any complex computation. A microcontroller based hardware prototype is developed to create signature patterns of appliances for characterization purposes utilizing SST in its firmware and its performance is evaluated with IEEE 1459-2010 dataset. These signature patterns are exploited for characterization of five different appliances.

Enabling Privacy in a Distributed Game-Theoretical Scheduling System for Domestic Appliances

Demand side management (DSM) makes it possible to adjust the load experienced by the power grid while reducing the consumers’ bill. Game-theoretic DSM is an appealing decentralized approach for collaboratively scheduling the usage of domestic electrical appliances within a set of households while meeting the users’ preferences about the usage time. The drawback of distributed DSM protocols is that they require each user to communicate his/her own energy consumption patterns, which may leak sensitive information regarding private habits. This paper proposes a distributed privacy-friendly DSM system that preserves users’ privacy by integrating data aggregation and perturbation techniques: users decide their schedule according to aggregated consumption measurements perturbed by means of additive white Gaussian noise. We evaluate the noise power and the number of users required to achieve a given privacy level, quantified by means of the increase of the information entropy of the aggregated energy consumption pattern. The performance of our proposed DSM system is compared to the one of a benchmark system that does not support privacy preservation in terms of total bill, peak demand, and convergence time. Results show that privacy can be improved at the cost of increasing the peak demand and the number of game iterations, whereas the total bill is only marginally incremented.

Effects of Single and Repeated Exposure to a 50-Hz 2-mT Electromagnetic Field on Primary Cultured Hippocampal Neurons.

The prevalence of domestic and industrial electrical appliances has raised concerns about the health risk of extremely low-frequency magnetic fields (ELF-MFs). At present, the effects of ELF-MFs on the central nervous system are still highly controversial, and few studies have investigated its effects on cultured neurons. Here, we evaluated the biological effects of different patterns of ELF-MF exposure on primary cultured hippocampal neurons in terms of viability, apoptosis, genomic instability, and oxidative stress. The results showed that repeated exposure to 50-Hz 2-mT ELF-MF for 8 h per day after different times in culture decreased the viability and increased the production of intracellular reactive oxidative species in hippocampal neurons. The mechanism was potentially related to the up-regulation of Nox2 expression. Moreover, none of the repeated exposure patterns had significant effects on DNA damage, apoptosis, or autophagy, which suggested that ELF-MF exposure has no severe biological consequences in cultured hippocampal neurons.

Analysis of Implementation of FACTS Devices in Power Factor Improvement

This paper presents an analysis of implementation of Flexible AC Transmission System (FACTS) devices for maintaining Power Factor. The electrical loads include induction motor driven equipments, which consume reactive power, increase the amount of apparent power in the distribution system, which is important because a low power factor can waste energy, and results in inefficient use of electrical power and often result in higher energy bills. The improvement of Power Factor as close as unity is very essential in the industry as well as domestic electric appliances, due to increase in power demand. The Power factor maintenance provides increase in system efficiency. The solution for power factor unity is done with FACTS devices, which has the manageable capacity. The possibility of low power factor increases with inductive load in nature. Hence, the need of unity in power factor is very significant.

Interactive Displays: The Next Omnipresent Technology [Point of View

Visual display of information is an obvious requirement in today,s highly digital world, and constitutes a powerful means of conveying complex information. This stems from the ability of the human eye and brain to perceive and process vast quantities of data in parallel. The history of visualizing information can be traced to the ancient era, when our ancestors carved images on cave walls and monuments. Mosaic art form emerged in the 3rd millennium BC, using small pieces of glass, stone, or other materials in combination to display information. These pieces are similar to pixels in the modern electronic display. The electronic display has become the primary human-machine interface in most applications, ranging from mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops to TVs, signage, and domestic electrical appliances, not to mention industrial and analytical equipment. In the meantime, user interaction with the display has progressed significantly. Through sophisticated hand gestures, the display has evolved to become a highly efficient information exchange device. While interactive displays are currently very popular in mobile electronic devices such as smartphones and tablets, the development of large-area, flexible electronics, offers great opportunities for interactive technologies on an even larger scale. Indeed technologies that were once considered science fiction are now becoming a reality; the transparent display and associated smart surface being a case in point. Examines the market for interactive displays as the next omnipresent technology.