Researchers in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University are on a mission to help develop a bank of knowledge about electricity needs in the areas affected by Hurricane Harvey and technology to quickly reconfigure power electronics intelligence at the network edge (PINE).
Dr. Le Xie, Prasad Enjeti, P.R. Kumar, SGC Collaborators, have won a NSF Rapid Response Research (RAPID) Grant to conduct research focusing on collecting initial data and developing novel power electronics interface at the end-users level so that communities can restore at least portions of the critical power needs with distributed energy resources before the main power infrastructure is restored.
RAPID: Powering Through the Hurricane: Self-Organizing Power Electronics Intelligence at the Network Edge
Brief Summary
As Texas e xperiences the strongest hurricane in more than 50 years, communities are working tirelessly to rebuild homes and infrastructure. As the lifeblood of modern civil society, electricity has not been fully restored in many neighborhoods because of the long repair time for the bulk power infrastructure.
This RAPID project aims at collecting data of electricity needs in areas affected by Hurricane Harvey, and developing fast reconfigurable power electronics intelligence at the network edge (PINE). The objective is to enable end users to quickly restore prioritized electric loads during the recovery phase. The approach is to integrate distributed energy resources that are readily available, as well as to endow the distribution grid with edge-based power electronics control, so as to provide local communities with at least the critical portion of their electricity needs.
NSF information can be found here>