This equipment award will allow the establishment of a computer graphics facility to support research in the computer aided design and analysis of electric power distribution systems. Four projects will use the equipment, they involve; load modelling, feeder reconfiguration, harmonic propagation and applications of artificial intelligence to power systems. These projects are primarily related to the distribution automation system which has caused many new general problems to be investigated. The projects are being sponsored by the newly established Electric Power Research Center (EPRC) at N.C. State which is an organization supported by electric power industry companies to promote basic and applied research. The equipment being requested includes a graphics workstation, digitizing board, color plotter and also hardware and software for the existing MICROVAX configuration. The proposed equipment will supplement a DEC MICROVAX-II and ETHERNET interfacing equipment already in place. This additional graphics capability will be used to facilitate the manipulation of large distribution system data bases and to represent results in a more comprehensive fashion.
