NDSU researchers are leading a team that has been awarded a $496,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled "CPS: Breakthrough: Collaborative Research: WARP: Wide Area assisted Resilient Protection."
NDSU will receive more than $314,000, while New Mexico State University will receive about $182,300. The grant is associated with the “Breakthrough” category of the NSF Cyber-Physical Systems program. The category focuses on significant advances in cyber-physical science, engineering and technology that have the potential to change the field, and is therefore extremely competitive.
Rajesh Kavasseri, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, is the project's principal investigator, while Nilanjan Ray Chaudhuri, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, is the co-principal investigator. The work is in collaboration with NMSU colleague Sukumar Brahma.
The project proposes a radical solution to avert cascading failures and blackouts in bulk power systems by designing a new genre of "resilient" protection schemes.
"We are excited to win this award, especially in the 'Breakthrough' category, the most competitive within the Cyber-Physical Systems program,” Kavasseri said.
The electric power grid often experiences disturbances that are routinely controlled, managed or eliminated by system protection measures. Despite this, the grid sometimes experiences disruptive events that can catapult the system toward a blackout. Swiftly arresting such blackouts has remained elusive so far, according to the researchers.
Using wide-area measurements, estimation and computation, WARP would allow protective devices to be supervised and endow them with “look-ahead” capabilities for judicious operation. The project would pro-vision the electric grid with the capacity to auto-correct and bounce back from problems. It is intended to curtail the size, scale and progression of blackouts and improve the robustness and resilience of the electric grid, which the researchers describe as the nation’s most critical infrastructure.
The NSF award number is 1544621 and the abstract can be found here.
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