In 2005, two years after the most catastrophic power failure in U.S. history, an elite group of electrical engineering researchers at the University of Arkansas, led by Dr. Alan Mantooth, received a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to investigate and develop purely electronic systems to help modernize the nation's outdated power grid.

Alan Mantooth: It is a center that's based on advanced power electronics, so our focus is the research and development of power electronics that start from materials and packaging and transcend all the way up to the application itself. 

The award allowed the researchers to establish the National Center for Reliable Electric Power Transmission, or NCREPT. In addition to faculty researchers, NCREPT includes engineers, students and a unique test facility, which is located at the Arkansas Research and Technology Park in south Fayetteville.

Juan Balda: But the uniqueness is the third leg, if you want to call it that way, of NCREPT, which is the test facility.  We are able to test up to about 15 kilovolts, or 15,000 volts, and about 300 amperes or 6 megavolt amperes.  We're able to mimic the response of distribution feeders, those overhead lines that go in front of your house.

Alan Mantooth: The federal government, in response to the 2003 blackout, began to investigate what happened first. Many recommendations were made as to what are the strategic initiatives that need to be undertaken to assure that this would not happen again, or if it did, it would be minimized and localized, so it wouldn't propagate out of control as it did.

Under supervision of faculty researchers, engineers and students at NCREPT design, develop and test systems that will prevent or mitigate power failures.

Erik Johnson: Osama and I are working on the solid-state, fault-current limiter, and essentially it's a new revolution in power protection devices.

Alan Mantooth: This device limits the fault current that would occur when let's say when a power line were to touch a tree or hit the ground, and a fault current or a fault condition exists. What you'll get is a rush of current going down the line that can damage downstream equipment and can cause a blackout to propagate. 

Erik Johnson: Each year we lose billions of dollars due to blackouts. Customers aren't able to produce products and continue their services. So through the use of a solid-state, fault-current limiter, we can actually ride through faults. We won't see the full magnitude of a fault, so we'll be less susceptible to blackouts.

Juan Balda: By minimizing this fault currents, the equipment like power transformers at the substations basically are not going to be subjected to this large fault current, and therefore the useful life could be extended.

Osama Saadeh: The work that we've been doing is of interest to a lot of companies, a lot of government agencies, including the Department of Energy, including the Navy, including a lot of public utilities. It's the kind of work you would see at an R&D research for a company or a government-sponsored agency. 

Juan Balda: Another component of NCREPT is developing of manpower - in our case, basically our students.

Alan Mantooth: You'll see numbers anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of the engineering workforce in the electric power field is currently about ready to retire. These are the men and women that built our electric power grid in the 50s and 60s. They know it better than anyone else. They work with it every day and they're about to retire. Well as a result, utilities are very interested in hiring new graduates to come in before these men and women retire and learn the current system from the people who built it.

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