Abhishek Banerjee, a doctoral student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, won second place out of more than 200 entries in the graduate student poster contest at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Power and Energy Society general meeting held Aug. 5-9 in Portland, Oregon. The conference, the most prestigious in North America in the field of power engineering, was attended by more than 3,000 members of academia and industry.

Banerjee co-wrote the poster “A Hybrid Approach towards Event Detection in Multi-machine Power Systems” with Rajesh Kavasseri, professor of electrical and computer engineering. 

The goal of the research is to improve the resilience of the nation’s power grid, one of America’s most critical pieces of infrastructure, by giving it the ability to auto-correct and bounce back from problems.

Banerjee and Kavasseri have used high fidelity measurements and algorithms to analyze energy function components of power systems to identify disturbances and the events directly linked to them.

In the future, the researchers hope to extend the work to a larger system so they can observe more interactions during extreme events. They also plan to assess scalability and accuracy-run-time trade-offs, and quantify the degree of resilience achieved to prevent the occurrence of cascading events leading to a blackout.

The research is funded by a National Science Foundation grant, Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) Breakthrough: WARP: Wide Area assisted Resilient Protection, Award Number 1544621.

Banerjee’s work also was honored at the recent North American Power Symposium, hosted by NDSU Sept. 9-11.

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