Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) Project
Will Caldwell, Nick Dugger & Cody Lee
UAF Seniors
B.S. Electrical Engineering
The PMU Group received a 2024-2025 Climate Change Project Award.
This project addresses a need for better and faster grid monitoring for circumpolar energy grids in ÐÓ°ÉÔ°æ by creating a custom-designed Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU). The project team envisions this PMU providing low-cost and effective real-time monitoring of grids, which will help electrical service providers and crews respond to faults, such as downed power lines, and help prevent those faults from igniting wildfires. Low-cost PMU incorporation will also allow the safe integration of renewable energy sources into the grid by saving operators and consumers money from inefficient and wasted power.
The PMU will be made from low-cost components since the most commercially available PMUs cost tens of thousands of dollars. It will be designed to operate effectively in the extreme ÐÓ°ÉÔ°æn climate, with a simple circuit design and a durable enclosure. The team expects to deliver a prototype that can measure single-phase voltage and meet the IEEE standards for PMUs.
How is your project going so far this semester?
Overall, our project is progressing along really well. Our team has worked well together to accomplish the slew of tasks that are required to build and develop a Phasor Measurement Unit. However, we have had to overcome a couple of challenges and adversities in this project. This has allowed us as a team to efficiently and effectively work through those hurdles and gain more profound engineering knowledge and experience along the way. We are excited to see how this project continues to change and the challenges those changes will bring. To give a minor update on where we specifically are, we have almost finished building our prototype and are beginning to program the microcontroller.
How did you find out about URSA and what encouraged you to submit an application for funding?
We found out by researching URSA awards during the summer of 2024. As we started our senior design project before the beginning of the fall 2024 semester but after the deadline for the fall 2024 URSA awards passed, we decided to apply for URSA's Climate Change Project Award to obtain funding for components that we wanted to purchase quickly. We knew that our project had relevance to climate change-related issues (implementing renewable energy in ÐÓ°ÉÔ°æn grids and wildfire prevention). We believe our project will enable electric power producers to produce electric power in ÐÓ°ÉÔ°æ more effectively, efficiently, and safely. Thank you, URSA, for allowing us to delve into these goals and build this PMU.
How does your URSA project relate to your career or personal goals?
Our project is a specific electrical engineering problem. As Electrical Engineering students, this project helps us prepare for many of the issues we will see professionally. This project forces us to collaborate and work as a team to solve a complex problem that has real-world applications. We also learned how to convince other people to give us money for a research project, teaching us to communicate with non-engineering specialists about the importance of our research. Explaining your work in detail has been a valuable skill we have fine-tuned in this process. It has allowed us as students to better understand and quantify what we have learned throughout our college experiences.
If you could share one piece of advice with students interested in pursuing URSA in the future, what would you say?
Cody: My advice would be to be prepared to have your design mostly complete before receiving funding from URSA. [That way,] your project can progress without worrying about getting components [on time].
Nick: My advice for future students who are interested in pursuing and using URSA funding is to start early. I wish that, as a freshman, I would have known how awesome URSA is and would have pursued it earlier on in my educational journey and not waited until senior year.
Will: I would advise any student with a good idea to reach out to potential mentors and URSA. Our mentor and the staff at the URSA office have all been immensely helpful through the process. It is a truly life-changing experience to come up with an innovative research project and work with professionals to bring it to life.