This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The objective of this research is to improve the reliability and restoration capability of wide area Power Grids (PG) thereby reducing power outages and their cascade effects. The approach is to embed novel intelligent sensors with distributed processing tools to provide real time monitoring and control of PGs from transmission and distribution levels. Our sensors will provide accurate information to protective relays and enable intelligent islanding. The unique sensor architecture, fabrication, and signal processing issues will be addressed through a ?3-D Heterogeneous Sensor System on a Chip (3-D HSoC)? in a two-plane prototype: a sensor plane populated with multiple power grid sensor types, and a processing plane with both analog and digital (DSP) circuitry.
Intellectual Merit
Being compact, power stingy, and ultimately very inexpensive, the 3-D HSoC sensors will be massively deployable in wide and local area power grids. Disturbances, dislocations, or changes in state in the PG will be sensed and analyzed on chip for wide area monitoring and control.
Broader Impacts
The 3-D HSoC proposed here can begin to transform our power grid to a next generation ?smart grid.? The grant will also have a major impact in promoting teaching, training and learning. It will support two graduate students, and will significantly benefit several graduate courses including ?Smart Power Grids?, ?Microsystems and MEMS Technology?, and a nationally unique ?Heterogeneous System on a Chip? course. To broaden impact, the advances will be shared with the power industry, government, and academia through a dedicated web site and scientific publications.
