Shannon Strank of UT-CEM

Abstract:

Electrical power is integral to our daily lives, from banking and water supply to fueling vehicles, heating and cooling homes, grocery shopping, and beyond. Modern society and national economies are fundamentally dependent on electrical energy to function. As such, power outages are among the most disruptive events in contemporary life.

Aging legacy infrastructure, coupled with the growing frequency of extreme weather events and the deep penetration of inverter-based distributed energy resources (DERs), has made power system operation significantly more complex. In this evolving context, faults that were traditionally handled reactively must now be addressed through more proactive strategies. Specifically, incipient failures must be identified and addressed before they escalate into major faults or widespread outages.

Historically, fault management in distribution systems has relied on reactive measures, often limited to substation relays or reclosers in large rural feeders. However, this model can evolve toward proactive and distributed sensing across the grid.  Early detection of incipient faults, especially high-impedance faults (HIFs), that often accompany insulation degradation, self-clearing events, or vegetation contact with conductors is imperative. HIFs normally produce low fault currents that go undetected by conventional protection systems, accounting for a significant portion of outages in distribution networks. Furthermore, these faults can ignite wildfires, posing severe threats to public safety and the environment.

To address this challenge, the University of Texas Center for Electromechanics (UT-CEM) in Austin, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), has developed and high-bandwidth, line-mounted sensors and deployed at a local rural utility. This effort is part of a broader research initiative conducted jointly with Eaton at state-of-the-art medium-voltage laboratories.  This presentation will highlight UT-CEM’s recent research advancements and explore potential future applications of these technologies.

Biography:

Ms. Shannon Strank joined the University of Texas at Austin Center for Electromechanics (UT-CEM) in 2006 after spending six years as a support engineer in private industry. While she enjoyed her mechanical engineering and research work during her early career, her exposure to a wide breath of applications and analysis really drove Ms. Strank toward program development.

Following completion of an MBA at UT Austin, Ms. Strank became the Assistant Director for UT-CEM. Today she works closely with Center Program Managers to implement a funding strategy for the Center. She identifies and interacts with potential research sponsors, including individuals, corporations and foundations, to ensure that UT-CEM maintains diverse funding sources toward world changing research. At UT-CEM, relationships with all stakeholders are essential to the Center’s success. Ms. Strank manages communication of UT-CEM’s accomplishments and activities both within UT and to external partners. Most importantly, she leverages her experience as both a mechanical engineer and a business manager to ensure the Center produces novel technologies to benefit the ever-changing needs of industry.

In addition to her program development responsibilities, she also provides oversight and guidance for a number of projects under the UT-CEM Grid Solutions program.  These applications include electric ship MVDC design and control, fault prediction and mitigation, fault detection and lifetime prediction for insulative materials, and more.