Toshiba Research Laboratory (TRL), UK

Toshiba Corporation established Toshiba Research Europe Limited in 1998 and opened the Telecommunications Research Laboratory (TRL) in the heart of Bristol and has enjoyed a productive collaborative relationship with a number of UK Universities expanding its scope over the years from telecommunications systems to other infrastructure systems including energy networks.
Given Toshiba’s standing as a world leader in the Smart Metering and Transmission and Distribution businesses for the Power industry, systems and networks research group of Toshiba Telecommunication Research Laboratory, has been researching into integration of various smart grid enabling technologies including smart meters, renewable generations such as PV and Wind Power, storage solutions and advance control and ICT systems. Toshiba researchems.

Dr. Mahesh Sooriyabandara received his BScEng (Hons) from University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka and his PhD from University of Aberdeen, UK. In 2004, he joined Telecommunication Research Laboratory of Toshiba Research Europe, Bristol, UK, where he is currently Associate Managing Director. Prior to this, Mahesh was a Research Fellow attached to Electronics Research Group of University of Aberdeen, UK. His main areas of research interest in the networked systems more specifically wireless networks, Internet Engineering, Smart Grid and Machine-to-Machine Communications. Mahesh is a senior member of the IEEE and ACM and a Chartered Engineer.

Dr. Silviu Nistor received his BEng degree in Electrical Engineering from G. Asachi University, Iasi, Romania, in 2009 and his PhD on the same topic at Cardiff University, UK, in 2015. Currently he is a Research Engineer at the Toshiba Research Europe Limited, UK. His research interests include Smart Grids and Hydrogen production.

Completed and on-going projects

Toshiba research lab in Bristol has participated in many EC FP5, FP6 and FP7 projects as well as UK government funded project covering various topics. For instance, SUNSEED (EC FP7) and Island Hydrogen (UK TSB) are two on-going collaborative projects in smart energy area.

Facilities
TRL’s Hydrogen Energy System Simulation (HESS) environment integrates a hydrogen production module, hydrogen demand module, electricity generation module & interfaces with other software. HESS offers the possibility to analyse the technical feasibility and the economics of hydrogen systems considering interactions with the power distribution system and the transport network. HESS has the capability to simulate the operation of refuelling stations over timespans of multiple years, timespans required to draw conclusions on the commercial viability of the hydrogen solution examined.

Key publications

• Silviu Nistor, Saraansh Dave, Zhong Fan, Mahesh Sooriyabandara, Technical and economic analysis of hydrogen refuelling, Applied Energy, Available online 2 November 2015, ISSN 0306-2619, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2015.10.094.
• Sathsara Abeysinghe, Silviu Nistor, Jianzhong Wu, Mahesh Sooriyabandara, Impact of Electrolysis on the Connection of Distributed Generation, Energy Procedia, Volume 75, August 2015, Pages 1159-1164, ISSN 1876-6102, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.egypro.2015.07.547.
• Saraansh Dave, Mahesh Sooriyabandara, Mike Yearworth, System behaviour modelling for demand response provision in a smart grid, Energy Policy, Volume 61, October 2013, Pages 172-181, ISSN 0301-4215, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.05.098.
• J. Wilcox, D. Kaleshi and M. Sooriyabandara, "DIRECTOR: A distributed communication transport manager for the Smart Grid," Communications (ICC), 2014 IEEE International Conference on, Sydney, NSW, 2014, pp. 4227-4232.