NSF Award
2217504
The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of a technology with the potential to substantially reduce downtimes and associated costs to electricity customers following power outages. This includes the cost to industrial consumers, such as production lines shutting down, as well as property/goods damage or life-threatening conditions to residential and commercial consumers (e.g. loss of heating system or refrigeration unit during a natural phenomenon). In addition, our technology provides a rich ground for scientific and technological advancement in the field of power system protection given its versatility and accuracy features. The proposed fault location technology is applicable in different research areas including transmission, distribution, microgrids and hybrid systems for overhead lines and underground cables. Furthermore, the unique visualization capabilities of our technology pave the way for its utilization outside of the realm of fault location and detection, such as for conditioning monitoring, fault prediction, and preventive maintenance, all crucial aspects for reliable and continuous delivery of electricity to consumers.<br/><br/>This I-Corps project is based on the development of a method that reconstructs the complete fault line and produces a visually rich colormap in the space-time plane. This colormap clearly illustrates not only the fault location, but also the fault type and severity. The comprehensive data provided by this colormap is further processed to obtain a very accurate fault location estimation. Unlike existing methods, our method is not restricted to certain types of systems or fault conditions and, given its visual capabilities, it does not require the amount of time needed by existing tools to identify a fault. The technology relies on the combination of: versatility: applicable to any type of transmission system under any type of fault; accuracy: the reconstruction of the complete fault condition along the line allows exact pinpointing its position; and speed: its visualization features enable very fast fault location with low sampling rate, which translates into low computational burden.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
