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Lightning is an electrical discharge during storms that can be monitored continuously from certain distances. It can be either within clouds (intra cloud), or between clouds and the ground (cloud-ground). There are various techniques used nowadays to locate lightning, and to determine various parameters produced from lightning. Each technique provides its own claimed performances. This paper attempts to provide instantaneous detection of lightning strike lightning location using the Time of Arrival (TOA) method of a single detection station (comprises of four antennas). It also models the whole detection system using suitable mathematical equations so as to give some understanding on the differences between the measured and calculated (theoretical) results. The measurement system is based on the application of mathematical and geometrical formulas. Several parameters such as the distance from the radiation source to the station and the lightning path are significant in influencing the accuracy of the results (elevation and azimuth angles). The role of each parameter is examined in detail using Matlab. This study solved the resultant non-linear equations by Newton-Raphson techniques. Methods to determine the radiation source which include the exact coordinate of a given radiation source in 3-dimensions were also developed. Further clarifications on the cause of errors in the single-station TOA method and techniques to reduce the errors are given.

The use of a new control method for grid-connected inverters for reducing the output current harmonic distortion in a wide range of grid-connected distributed generation (DG) applications, including wind turbine (WT) and fuel cell (FC) inverters is proposed in this paper. The control method designed to eliminate main harmonics in a microgrid (MG) and between MG and point of common coupling (PCC) and responsible for the correction of the system unbalance. Another advantage of the proposed control method is that it can be easily adopted into the DG control system without the installation of extra hardware. The proposed control method is comprised of the synchronous reference frame method (SRF). Results from the proposed control method are provided to show the feasibility of the proposed approach.

This work presents a new Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) scheme which predicts the local peak positions precisely and tracks the global peak under partial shading effectively. In addition to that, a skipping mechanism is integrated into it, which helps the MPPT to avoid scanning several sections of the I-V or P-V curve.Consequently, the global peak tracking gets accurate and faster than existing MPPT techniques. Several rigorous experiments are carried out in Matlab/Simulink to verify the behaviour of the MPPT. It is observed that under deep shading where the global peak resides on the left zone in voltage profile, tracking speed gets significantly faster. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is implemented in hardware through buck-boost converter in conjunction with dSpace DS1104 board to justify the applicability. Tracking results under several partial shading shows that the proposed method outperforms other MPPT techniques namely Modified Incremental Conductance (MIC), Ant colony optimization-P&O (ACO-P&O) and Cuckoo Search (CS) by a significant margin. Tracking speed is improved by 2 to 3 times depending on the shading pattern and efficiency is well ensured over 99% under all cases.

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