Paper Info
Title
Hypertemporal Imaging of NYC Grid Dynamics: Short paper.
Abstract
Hypertemporal visible imaging of an urban lightscape can reveal the phase of the electrical grid granular to individual housing units. In contrast to in-situ monitoring or metering, this method offers broad, persistent, real-time, and non-permissive coverage through a single camera sited at an urban vantage point. Rapid changes in the phase of individual housing units signal changes in load (e.g., appliances turning on and off), while slower building- or neighborhood-level changes can indicate the health of distribution transformers. We demonstrate the concept by observing the 120 Hz flicker of lights across a NYC skyline. A liquid crystal shutter driven at 119.75 Hz down-converts the flicker to 0.25 Hz, which is imaged at a 4 Hz cadence by an inexpensive CCD camera; the grid phase of each source is determined by analysis of its sinusoidal light curve over an imaging \"burst\" of some 25 seconds. Analysis of bursts taken at ~ 15 minute cadence over several hours demonstrates both the stability and variation of phases of halogen, incandescent, and some fluorescent lights. Correlation of such results with ground-truth data will validate a method that could be applied to better monitor electricity consumption and distribution in both developed and developing cities.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2993422.2993570
BuildSys@SenSys
Keywords
Field
DocType
Urban science:observing techniques,imaging,time series analysis
Cadence,Flicker,Simulation,Distribution transformer,Shutter,Remote sensing,Incandescent light bulb,Electrical grid,Engineering,Metering mode,Grid
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
BuildSys '16 Proceedings of the 3rd ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Built Environments, Pages 61-64, Palo Alto, CA, USA, November 16 - 17, 2016
1
0.39
References 
Authors
1
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Federica B. Bianco111.40
Steven E. Koonin221.05
Charlie Mydlarz3244.24
Mohit S. Sharma41912.51