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Case Studies

Written by people with industrial experience, the case studies listed in this section takes you directly into the Industries to discuss various problems faced by Design and Maintenance Engineers in their daily routine jobs. Through these case studies, engineer’s share their valuable experience on how they managed to find solutions for the problems that they faced in their respective industry.

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Electrical Engineers Case Studies – Problems & Solutions

In this article, you will learn about the electrical engineers’ and technicians’ case studies, common problems and their solutions.

Table of Contents

Electrical Engineers Case Studies

Case study 1 – surge protection failure.

Problem: A technology company is experiencing frequent damage to their electronic equipment. The equipment is being damaged by voltage surges on the power grid, resulting in costly repairs and lost productivity.

Solution: The electrical engineer identified that the surge protection devices in place were not sufficient to protect the equipment.

The engineer designed and implemented a new surge protection system that included a combination of surge arresters, surge suppressors, and voltage regulators to effectively protect the equipment from voltage surges.

The engineer also provided training to the maintenance team on how to properly maintain the new surge protection system.

Case Study 2 – Arc Flash Hazard

Problem: A manufacturing plant is experiencing an increased number of electrical accidents, including arc flash incidents. The accidents are causing injuries to employees and costly equipment damage.

Solution: The electrical engineer conducted a thorough assessment of the electrical system to identify potential arc flash hazards.

The engineer then implemented a program to mitigate the hazards, including the installation of arc flash protection devices, the implementation of safe work procedures, and employee training on electrical safety.

The engineer also set up a regular maintenance schedule for the electrical equipment to minimize the risk of arc flash incidents.

Case Study 3 – Energy Efficiency Retrofit

Problem: A commercial building is experiencing high energy costs, due to outdated and inefficient electrical systems.

Solution: The electrical engineer conducted an energy audit of the building to identify opportunities for energy efficiency improvements.

The engineer then designed and implemented an energy efficiency retrofit, including the installation of energy-efficient lighting, HVAC controls, and power monitoring systems.

Case Study 4 – Backup Power System Upgrade

Problem: A hospital is experiencing frequent power outages, and the existing backup power system is not providing reliable power during outages.

Solution: The electrical engineer conducted a review of the existing backup power system and identified that it was outdated and not sufficient to meet the hospital’s power needs.

The engineer designed and implemented an upgrade to the backup power system, including the installation of new generators, transfer switches, and uninterruptible power supplies. The engineer also provided training to the maintenance team on how to properly maintain the new backup power system.

Case Study 5 – Motor Control Center Upgrade

Problem: A factory is experiencing frequent equipment breakdowns, due to outdated and unreliable motor control centers.

Solution: The electrical engineer conducted a review of the existing motor control centers and identified that they were outdated and not reliable.

The engineer designed and implemented an upgrade to the motor control centers, including the installation of new motor control devices, variable frequency drives, and control systems. The engineer also provided training to the maintenance team on how to properly maintain the new motor control centers.

Case Study 6 – Smart Grid Implementation

Problem: A utility company wants to improve the efficiency and reliability of their power grid, by implementing a smart grid system.

Solution: The electrical engineer designed and implemented a smart grid system, including the installation of smart meters, advanced metering infrastructure, and a communication network . The engineer also provided training to the utility’s staff on how to use the new system and worked with the utility’s customers to educate them on how to use the new system to optimize their energy usage.

These unique case studies show how electrical engineers can use their skills and knowledge to design, implement, and maintain advanced electrical systems that improve efficiency, reliability, and safety.

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Case Studies

Vibration Measurement: Wireless Portable Stroke Monitor

A manufacturer of vibrating feeder equipment was purchasing a private-labelled off-the-shelf Bluetooth Low Energy enabled accelerometer. The supplier was unable to keep up with product demand and had raised the price significantly. A lower cost solution was needed. 

Topics: Electronic Engineering

Power Electronics: Digital Pump Drive

Power a laboratory pump system occupying only one-half the bench space with one-quarter the volume of the current product, and increase performance while also reducing cost.

Topics: Electronic Engineering , Motor Drives

Water Chemistry: Chemical Feed Controller

Bring laboratory-grade water analysis and chemical feed control to large-scale commercial and industrial water cooling tower systems.

A custom designed, solid-state, highly accurate multi-channel fluorometer combined with a microprocessor-driven chemical feed controller.

Accurate chemical monitoring and feed control of chemicals in cooling tower water systems is required to reduce mineral scale, corrosion, and microbe growth. Relatively high volumes of expensive chemicals are required to protect these systems.

Topics: Electronic Contract Manufacturing , Electronic Engineering , Firmware Development , Industrial Controls

Product Design: Designing for Reliability and Manufacturability

Refine a proof-of-concept design to optimize product reliability, compliance to regulatory standards, and manufacturability.

Develop a system of circuit boards and interconnections for cost effective integration and manufacturing while adhering to industry and regulatory standards.

Assessing the viability of a product idea can be difficult. The process often begins with a rough design sketched on paper. As the research and development phases of the project move forward, one or more proof-of-concept prototypes are often required.

Topics: Electronic Contract Manufacturing , Electronic Engineering , Product Development

MathCad Circuit Modeling: Improving Circuit Design

Meet aggressive project schedules while reducing hardware development costs by improving the circuit design process.

The addition of detailed electronic circuit modeling in the latest release of the PTC MathCad software environment provides a powerful tool to simulate, optimize, and document the circuit design prior to building a PC board.

SPICE simulation alone will only report the performance of a circuit design, but it will not recommend component values to meet the design goals.

Industrial Monitoring & Control: Boiler Control

Create a modular, expandable, configurable and robust boiler monitoring and control system that can be used world-wide.  The system must be able to connect to a wide range of external input sources as well as control external devices.  Ethernet, USB and modem connectivity are required.

An NXP 32-bit ARM7 processor, multiple Microchip 8-bit PICs, Micro Digital SMX operating system, ANSI C, and the IAR Embedded Workbench were used to create this extendable, robust, highly flexible system.

Tecnova was asked to build the next generation of industrial controllers for a long standing customer. The customer's goal was ambitious – configurable enough to support multiple current product lines as well as future products not yet envisioned.

Topics: Electronic Contract Manufacturing , Electronic Engineering , Industrial Controls

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13: Student led case study in engineering

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This is more of a student guided learning chapter. Since this is not a typical textbook section that consists of an instructor lecturing the student, this chapter might at times seem incomplete. It is intended to be incomplete as it is up to the student to complete it with guidance from a live teacher (whether in-person or over the internet). The basic idea is simple: a real engineering project is discussed in detail by the teacher in a manner that is consistent with real world activities as opposed to a more typical lecture (which has its place, just not here).

The case study herein is to design and construct a detector characterization laboratory which will include examination of said design using professional papers (examples of pre-peer reviewed papers can be found at: https://arxiv.org ). The student is expected to do all the research to prepare for discussion each day as if they were in a meeting to determine the direction of the engineering project. This is a participatory activity. In general there are really no wrong or right answers as long as they are within the scope of the research (if we ask what a chair is and you say it is a coffee cup...then yes that is wrong - but to say a chair is a couch is open to debate which should then occur among your classmates). It is expected that the instructor will be sufficiently skilled 1 in the subject matter to be able to take over the conversation and help the student navigate the subjects that they are not ready to handle as freshman. Lectures might occur when these type of road blocks emerge, but they should be infrequent.

The intend of this excursion is to build something to highlight different engineering disciplines. This particular case study centering on detectors will highlight electrical engineering, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, optical engineering, system engineering, chemical engineering, and materials engineering. There is no reason a different case study (say bridges) could be done, but it should follow the methodology highlighted here.

1 Note if the instructor is not sufficiently skilled in detector characterization then we would suggest the instructor modifies this to something he is skilled in, like a, the design of a bridge or water treatment plant, etc.

• 13.1: Example case study involving detectors characterization This is an example problem with criteria that is modifiable for the student led case study in engineering. It is expected that each student would write a large report (say 25 pages or so) to show their understanding of the discussion. Figures should be included including CADs.
• 13.2: Information for example case study involving detector characterization This is a hodgepodge of links etc. to help the student with the assignment posed in the last section. This section is meant to be edited constantly.

Engineering ethics cases for electrical and computer engineering students

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Analytic Research Foundations for the Next-Generation Electric Grid (2016)

Chapter: 7 case studies, 7 case studies, introduction.

This chapter presents several case studies, each of which connects power grid problems to mathematical and computational challenges. The chapter’s overall goal is to illustrate some current mathematical and computational techniques in greater detail than could be captured in earlier chapters. The first section provides an overview of some of the key optimization software used at one of the electricity markets mentioned in Chapter 2 (PJM) and discusses how solving the mathematical challenges would improve its capabilities. That is followed by a case study addressing how to predict and handle high-impact, low-frequency events that could threaten our critical infrastructure. The section “Case Study in Data-Centered Asset Maintenance: Predicting Failures in Underground Power Distribution Networks” discusses the prediction of failures that occur more commonly in which a single piece of equipment fails. This ties into the problem of data-driven asset maintenance, where each asset is a physical component of the grid (e.g., a cable or a transformer) that needs to be maintained before it fails. The section “Case Study in Synchrophasors” discusses synchrophasors, which utilize sensors that can determine both the magnitude and phase angles of power system voltages at rates of 30 to 60 samples per second. The final section presents a case study on real-time, inverter-based control, where potential problems are not only detected, but fast calculations and controls also are utilized to push signals back toward their reference settings.

CASE STUDY IN OPTIMIZATION: PJM’S DAILY OPERATIONS

PJM is a regional transmission organization that coordinates the movement of wholesale electricity in all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Acting as a neutral and independent party, PJM operates a competitive wholesale electricity market and manages the high-voltage electricity grid to ensure reliability for more than 61 million people. PJM Market Operations coordinates the continuous buying, selling, and delivery of wholesale electricity through the energy market. In its role as market operator, PJM balances the needs of suppliers, wholesale customers, and other market participants, and monitors market activities to ensure open, fair, and equitable access. The operation of PJM’s various markets requires the use of many software applications, which vary in purpose and complexity. The next subsection contains a high-level description of applications that are used to support the operation of PJM, which show how important optimization tools are to the power grid in general.

Day-Ahead Market

As covered in Chapter 2 , the purpose of the day-ahead market is to make the generator commitment decisions a day ahead of time so the generators have sufficient time to start up or shut down. This market utilizes several different key applications, which are discussed in this subsection.

The Resource Scheduling and Commitment application is a mixed-integer program responsible for committing the bulk—more than 90 percent—of the resource commitments for the PJM system. The following equation presents a simplified version of the unit commitment problem that PJM solves every day to commit resources in the day-ahead market. The objective function of day-ahead unit commitment is to minimize the total production cost of the system while adhering to the enforced transmission limitations. That is,

Subject to the following constraints:

1. Power balance constraint

2. Ancillary reserve constraint

3. Capacity constraints

For simplicity, neither the objective function nor the constraints are shown in the above unit commitment problem formulation, but they are included in the actual day-ahead market clearing software. Some elements that are in the actual formulation but omitted here for simplicity are transmission limitations enforced in the day-ahead market; temporal constraints of units such as start-up times and minimum run times; and the pumped storage hydro-optimization model that PJM currently uses.

A second piece of software used in the day-ahead market is the scheduling, pricing, and dispatch (SPD) application, a linear program that dispatches physical generation and demand resources already committed by resource scheduling and commitment. It can also dispatch virtual bids, including increment offers, decrement bids, and up-to-congestion transactions. Virtual bids are fundamental components of two-settlement markets in every independent system operator (ISO) /regional transmission organization (RTO) in the United States. They are financial instruments bid in by market participants to arbitrage differences between the day-ahead markets and real-time markets. The main benefits of virtual bids are mitigating the unbalance in supply and demand of market power and facilitating the convergence of price and unit commitment.

The third package is known as the simultaneous feasibility test (SFT), which is a contingency analysis program that performs a security analysis of the day-ahead market (details on contingency analysis are covered in Chapters 1 and 3 ). The SFT screens each dispatch hour for N – 1 overloads. If one is encountered, the SFT application passes information back to the SPD application regarding the N – 1 overload, and the SPD application enforces a specific transmission constraint to mitigate the overload and dispatches resources and calculated prices to appropriately reflect this limitation.

Real-Time Markets

The set of applications described in this section is part of the suite of applications that works simultaneously to control and price the PJM system in real time. The suite of applications includes tools that procure the ancillary services discussed in Chapter 2 and that provide resource commitment and dispatch functionality and, ultimately, the calculation of 5-minute locational marginal costs (LMPs) across the system (LMPs are also discussed in Chapter 2 ). In the real-time market tools there is no equivalent of the SFT application that exists in the day-ahead market. This is because N – 1 security constraints are identified by the security analysis package in PJM’s Energy Management System and are passed right into the dispatch tools listed below. A block diagram of these applications is given in Figure 7.1 , with each briefly discussed.

The Ancillary Services Optimizer is software that solves a mixed-integer program to optimize PJM’s hour-ahead ancillary services. This application jointly optimizes energy and reserves.

The Intermediate Term Security Constrained Economic Dispatch is a mixed-integer program that provides a time-coupled 2-hour forecast and unit commitment. This application uses forecast data and generator offer parameters to create a dispatch trajectory and unit commitment plans for the next 2 hours. The generator dispatch points calculated by this application are not used for system control. The main purpose of this application is to provide intraday unit commitment information to the system operator.

The Real Time Security Constrained Economic Dispatch (RT SCED) is a 10-min forward linear program that produces the economic dispatch points for all resources on the PJM system. PJM uses this application to dispatch all online generation resources from their current operating point to their most economic operating point based on a 10-min-ahead forecast of system conditions. For example, an RT SCED solution that is executed at 7:45 a.m. uses the current operating state of the system provided by the state estimator as a set of initial conditions. The application then uses load and constraint forecast information for 7:55 a.m., in addition to generator offer information such as ramp rates and the real power minimum/maximum limits, to dispatch the set of online generation resources of PJM in a least-cost fashion to meet system expectations 10 min into the future. This application runs every 5 min or on command by the PJM system operator.

The Locational Pricing Calculator is an application that is identical to the RT SCED application except that the market prices calculated in this application are for the entire network model as opposed to just for generation buses.

Capacity Market—Reliability Pricing Model Optimization

This is the market-clearing engine that clears the PJM capacity markets’ base residual and incremental capacity auctions. This application is a mixed-integer program that is used to clear PJM’s 3-year forward capacity auction. The main capacity auction, the Base Residual Auction, is run annually 3 years before the actual year for which the capacity is committed. This application uses demand curves to express the willingness to pay for capacity and supply offers to clear the market.

Financial Transmission Rights

Financial transmission rights (FTRs) provide a mechanism by which market participants can hedge against potential losses in the LMP market by providing a stream of revenue when there are price differences in the LMPs between different locations in the system, along what is known as an energy path. FTRs are acquired through auctions. Associated with FTR auctions is the SPD application, which is a linear program that dispatches FTR bids up to cleared quantities. The clearing of an FTR auction is similar to the clearing of point-to-point transactions like up-to-congestion transactions in the day-ahead market. These bid types are described by source and sink locations, as well as a maximum willingness to pay for the price spread between the locations. If the transaction clears, it imposes a flow on the transmission system that is based on the source and sink location and the topology of the system.

Challenges for the Day-Ahead Unit Commitment Formulation

The day-ahead market unit commitment problem is the most complex problem solved by most ISO/RTOs that operate power markets. Building on what was presented in the section “Day-Ahead Markets,” the problem could also be formulated using a Lagrangian relaxation where commitment decisions are approximated. The section on Day-Ahead Markets presents a mixed-integer program (MIP) formulation, where binary variables are used to more precisely model discrete decisions. While the MIP provides a more precise solution, it also takes longer to solve than the approximated Lagrangian relaxation solution. The MIP formulation that PJM utilizes to solve the day-ahead market unit commitment problem produces an efficient, reliable unit commitment that is the basis for the next operating day. Like anything else, however, it can be improved with the proper direction and investment.

ISOs and RTOs solve many other optimization problems to schedule and dispatch the system and clear power markets, but all can be derived by simplifying the day-ahead market unit commitment problem. Therefore, typically any challenges encountered in the solution process will be evident somewhere in the day-ahead market. Below is a brief summary of some of the common challenges PJM encounters:

• Significant increases in bid and offer volumes will increase the MIP solution time because of an increased number of binary and continuous variables.
• Large numbers of transmission constraints combined with continuous variables can cause a very dense matrix, which limits the ability to use more efficient sparse matrix solution techniques. Additionally, large numbers of continuous variables increase the time to solve each linear program (LP) in the search tree during the MIP searching process.
• Increasing the MIP gap to improve convergence tolerance and consistency between the LP and MIP solutions degrades performance exponentially. Decreasing the MIP gap to improve performance may result in nonunique MIP solutions.

The above challenges are in some way related to the size and scalability of the general unit commitment problem that exists today. The challenges in solution time presented by these issues typically have been addressed by increasing computer processing capability. If Moore’s law continues to hold true, the increases in computer capability may be able to meet the needs of the current unit commitment problem PJM solves. This does not change the need for mathematical work in the short term, however, nor does it change the fact that the problem is likely to become substantially larger as the power grid changes.

In order to make a step change in the size and complexity of the unit commitment problem being solved, there likely needs to be a significant increase in processing capability or a reformulation of the problem. For example, the ability to solve an ac unit commitment problem would be a significant breakthrough for ISO/RTOs in terms of unit commitment accuracy and efficiency. In today’s dc models, voltage and reactive constraints are linearized into dc approximations that attempt to model voltage restrictions that are real power flow limitations. This practice has been in place since the inception of power markets in the United States in the late 1990s; however, the practice still results in some unit commitment and market inefficiencies that a better model of ac constraints during the commitment, dispatch, and pricing process could improve.

An example of a simplification that is widely used is the modeling of a reactive limit in a dc model. Currently, reactive limits are an input into the dc problem based on offline studies and a predefined local area unit commitment, as opposed to being optimized as part of the unit commitment problem itself. In reality, the level of the reactive limit will vary based not only on the actual units committed but also on where they are dispatched, because of the relationship between active power and reactive power on generators. Currently, this level of granularity cannot be modeled efficiently enough to solve the problem within the time frame of the day-ahead market; therefore, the outcome of that market may be less efficient than it could have been. The general result is less transparent market prices and out-of-market uplift payments.

Approximated voltage constraints can also be problematic. From a market efficiency perspective, dispatching to a dc approximation of a voltage constraint can create some undesirable outcomes. For example, suppose 100 MW of FTR are sold on an energy path based on the thermal limit of the facility. If that path is then constrained in the day-ahead market or in real time to a flow less than the 100 MW of the FTRs sold because it is being used as a thermal proxy for a voltage constraint, the result will be underfunded FTRs on that path. The level of underfunding will vary depending on the difference between the FTR and day-ahead market and real-time market flows, as well as the shadow price to control the thermal surrogate.

In the dc-only solution in use today, voltage constraints are linearized so that they can be enforced in a linear program. This solution has its shortcomings; however, it is likely that there is a point of diminishing returns with the full ac model such that expansion of the problem beyond a certain point would yield little or no discernable benefit. The most efficient solution might be a blend of the two; the efforts focused on improving the model should consider the benefits and drawbacks of each.

For example, the breakpoint for gaining accuracy by implementing additional ac constraints in the model may stop at a certain voltage level (or in a certain geographic area surrounding a reactive or voltage constraint), such that those constraints would only need to be implemented selectively. This would cut down on the complexity added to the model, while adding the information needed to resolve these types of constraints more efficiently.

CASE STUDY IN MATHEMATICAL NEEDS FOR THE MODELING AND MITIGATION OF HIGH-IMPACT, LOW-FREQUENCY EVENTS

Worldwide, the bulk power system is one of the most critical infrastructures, vital to society in many ways, but it is not immune to severe disruptions that could threaten the health, safety, or economic well-being of the citizens it serves. The electric power industry has well-established planning and operating procedures in place to address “normal” emergency events (such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and ice storms) that occur from time to time and disrupt the supply of electricity. However, the industry has much less experience with planning for, and responding to, what the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) calls high-impact, low-frequency (HILF) events ( NERC, 2010 ).

The events that fall into this category must meet two criteria. First, they need to be extremely rare or they may never have actually occurred but are plausible. Second, their impact must be potentially catastrophic across a broad portion of the power system. These are events that if they occurred, could bring prolonged blackouts on a large scale, have an adverse economic impact reaching into the trillions of dollars, and kill millions of people. Our modern, just-in-time economy is becoming increasing fragile with respect to disruptions to critical infrastructures in which even short-time, localized blackouts are quite disruptive. Imagine if the power went out for many millions of people and would not be coming back on for weeks or months!

NERC identified several events that fall into the HILF category, including (1) coordinated physical attacks or cyberattacks, (2) pandemics, (3) high-altitude electromagnetic pulses (HEMPs), and (4) large-scale geomagnetic disturbances (GMDs). One such disturbance, a solar corona mass ejection, is shown in Figure 7.2 . The identification of these risks was not new with the 2010 report ( NERC, 2010 ), and some work has been done over the years to try to mitigate their impacts. One example is the recently published Electric Grid Protection (E-Pro) Handbook ( Stockton, 2014 ). Yet, collectively, HILF events present an interesting case study on the mathematical and computational challenges needed for the next-generation electric grid.

The existing power grid is certainly resilient, often able to operate reliably with a number of devices unexpectedly out of service. While blackouts are not rare, most are small in scale and short term, caused by local weather (e.g., thunderstorms), animals, vegetation, and equipment failures. Regional blackouts, affecting up to several million people for potentially a week or two, occur less frequently. Such events are usually due to ice storms, tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, severe storms, and, occasionally, equipment failure.

As an example, the derecho that happened in late June 2012 in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic and Midwest was one of the most destructive and deadly, fast-moving, and severe thunderstorm complexes in North American history. It was 200 miles wide, 600 miles long and registered winds as high as 100 mph as it tracked across the region. The morning after the event approximately 4.2 million customers were without electricity across 11 states and the District of Columbia, and restoration took 7 to 10 days ( DOE, 2012 ). A second example that same year was Superstorm Sandy, which caused 8.5 million customer power outages across 24 states, causing damage estimated at $65 billion ( Abi-Samra et al., 2014 ).

While tragic for those affected, aid from unaffected utilities helps to speed the recovery, and electric utility control centers have long experience in dealing with weather-related events. For example, during Superstorm Sandy utilities conducted the largest movement of restoration crews in history, with more than 70,000 utility personnel from across the United States and Canada deploying to support power restoration, and power restoration was an overriding priority for all U.S. federal departments, including the Department of Defense ( Stockton, 2014 ).

HILF events are in another, almost unthinkable category in which outages could affect tens of millions for potentially months. But ignoring these threats will not make them go away. HILF events are a category where fundamental research in the mathematical sciences could yield good dividends. The event types in this category are different and they require unique solutions. However, they also have commonalities that the committee describes here in presenting some of the relevant mathematical and computational research challenges.

Interdisciplinary Modeling

The HILF events are all interdisciplinary and hence cannot be solved by experts from any single domain. GMDs start at the Sun, travel through space, interact with Earth’s magnetic fields to induce electric fields at the surface that are dependent on the conductivity of Earth’s crust going down hundreds of kilometers and that ultimately cause quasi-dc currents to flow in the high-voltage transmission grid, saturating the transformers, causing increased power system harmonics, heating in the transformers, and higher reactive power loss and resulting in a potential voltage collapse ( NERC, 2012 ). In March 1989 a GMD estimated to have a magnetic field variation of up to 500 nT/min caused the collapse of Hydro-Québec’s electricity transmission system and damaged equipment, including a generator step-up transformer at the Salem Nuclear Plant in New Jersey. More concerning is the potential for much larger GMDs, such as the ones that occurred in 1921 and 1859, before the development of large-scale grids, with magnetic field variations estimated to have been as much as 5,000 nT/min; such GMDs could cause catastrophic damage to different infrastructures, including the electric grid ( Kappenman, 2012 ).

HEMPs have time scales ranging from nanoseconds to minutes. On the longer time scale of minutes, HEMP E3 1 is similar to an extremely large GMD, except with a faster rise time, requiring power system transient stability (TS) and TS-level modeling. Hence HEMPs would involve not only the disciplines surrounding GMD but also those surrounding the dynamics of nuclear explosions. A pandemic could affect a huge number of people, simultaneously impacting a large number of coupled infrastructures, including health, water, natural gas, and police and fire services. To defend against coordinated physical attacks would require a combination of power system knowledge and knowledge associated with the protection of physical assets, whereas defense against coordinated cyberattacks would need a combination of power system and cybersecurity domain knowledge. In modeling across different domains, each with its own assumptions and biases, mathematicians would be well positioned to help bridge the gaps between disciplines.

Rare Event Modeling

There is a need for research associated with HILFs in the area of rare event modeling. HILF events can be thought of as extreme manifestations of often more common occurrences. For example, while extreme GMDs are quite rare, more modest GMDs occur regularly, resulting in increasing quantities of data associated with their impacts on the grid. The same could be said for pandemics, while a large-scale attack on the grid would be a more severe manifestation of the disturbances (either deliberate or weather-induced) that occur regularly. The research challenge is extrapolation from the data sets associated with the more benign events.

Resilience Control Center Design

HILFs will stress the power system’s cyberinfrastructure. This could come about as a result of either a direct cyberattack or the stressing of computational infrastructure and algorithms in ways not envisioned by their design specifications. As an example, one impact of a GMD (or a HEMP E3) would be increased reactive power consumption on the high-voltage transformers. However, existing state estimator (SE) models do not provide for these reactive losses. Hence it is likely that during a moderate to severe GMD the SE would not converge, leaving the

___________________

1 The E3 component (a designation of the International Electrotechnical Commission, or IEC) of the pulse is a very slow pulse, lasting tens to hundreds of seconds, that is caused by the nuclear detonation heaving the Earth’s magnetic field out of the way, followed by the restoration of the magnetic field to its natural place.

control center without the benefit of the other advanced network analysis tools. Another issue is the potential inundation of data in either the communication infrastructure or in the application software. For example, during the blackout of August 14, 2003, operators in FirstEnergy Corp.’s control center were overwhelmed with phone calls, whereas the Midcontinent ISO real-time contingency analysis experienced hundreds of violations ( U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force, 2004 ). Resilient control center software design and testing is a key area for future research. Effective visualization of stressed system conditions is also an important area for computational research.

Resilience Power System Design

Ultimately the goal of HILF research is to either eliminate the risk or reduce its consequences. As such, there are a number of interesting research areas to pursue depending on the type of HILF. Of course, a starting point for this work is the ability to have reasonable models of the events, and the economic impacts of all mitigations need to be considered. One promising area is the extent to which the impact of GMDs and HEMP E3s can be mitigated through modified operating procedures, improved protection systems, or GMD blocking devices on transformer neutrals. Algorithms for GMD blocking device placement could leverage advances in mixed-integer programming algorithms. The impacts of cyberattacks or physical attacks could be mitigated by adaptive system islanding. The deployment of more distributed energy resources, such as solar photovoltaics (PV), could make the grid more resilient if they were enhanced by storage capabilities or coupled with other, less intermittent resources to allow more of the load to be satisfied by potentially autonomous microgrids.

CASE STUDY IN DATA-CENTERED ASSET MAINTENANCE: PREDICTING FAILURES IN UNDERGROUND POWER DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS

Figure 7.3 illustrates the genesis of a manhole fire and its results. The oldest and largest underground power distribution network in the world is that of New York City. A power failure in New York can be a catastrophic event, where several blocks of the city lose power simultaneously. In the low-voltage distribution network that traverses a whole city underground, these events are caused by the breakdown of insulation for the electrical cables. This causes a short circuit and burning of the insulation, a possible buildup of pressure, and an explosion of a manhole cover leading down to the electrical cables, with fire and/or smoke emanating from the manhole. The power company

would like to predict in advance which manholes are likely to have such an event and to prevent it. There can be problems beyond the low-voltage network, for instance in the feeder cables of the primary distribution network, or in the transformers that step down the power between high and low voltage, in the transmission system, or in any other part of the system. If reliability-centered asset maintenance can be effectively performed, the number of outages and failures that occur in the city could be substantially reduced.

In each borough of New York City, the power company, Consolidated Edison (ConEdison), has been collecting data about the power network since the power grid started, at the time of Thomas Edison. Back then, these data were collected for accounting purposes, but now ConEdison records data from many different sources so the data can be harnessed for better power grid operations. Some of the types of data sets that ConEdison collects are as follows:

• Company assets . Data tables of all electrical cables, cable sections, transformers, connectors, manholes, and service boxes (access points to the energy grid), including their connectivity and physical locations, physical properties (e.g., manufacturer of the copper cable), installation dates, and other relevant information.
• Trouble tickets. Records of past failures or outages, sometimes in the form of text documents.
• Supervisory control and acquisition (SCADA). Real-time measurements of the performance of equipment from monitors.
• Inspection reports. Records of each equipment inspection and the inspection results.
• Programs. Records of other preemptive maintenance programs, such as the vented cover replacement program, where solid manhole covers are replaced with vented covers that mitigate explosions, and the stray voltage detection program, where a mobile device mounted on a truck drives around the city and records stray voltage from already electrified equipment.

Discussed briefly below are some of the serious challenges in harnessing data from the past to prevent power failures in the future. See Rudin et al. (2010 , 2012 , 2014 ) for more details.

Data Integration

Data integration is a pervasive and dangerous problem that haunts almost all business intelligence. This is the problem of matching data records from one table to data records from another table when the identifiers do not exactly match. For instance, if the aim is to determine which electrical cables enter into which access points (manholes, service boxes) in Manhattan, a raw match without additional processing would miss over half of the cable records. Given that there is enough electrical cable within Manhattan to go almost all the way around the world, this data integration problem could lead to severe misrepresentation of the state of the power system. Data integration can be severely problematic generally. For one thing, companies need to locate records that provide a full view of each entity. They would like to know, for instance, that inspection reports detailing a particular faulty cable in a particular manhole are connected to customer complaints in a particular building, but there are many ways that this can go wrong: A cable identifier, manhole identifier, or street address that is mistyped in any of the tables could cause this connection to be missed.

One way to handle this problem is to create a machine learning classification model for predicting high-quality matches between two records from different tables. Let x be a vector of a pair of entities, one from each of the two tables to be joined. For example, consider cables and manholes where the three manhole identifiers are (1) type (manhole or service box), (2) number (e.g., 1,624), and (3) mains and service plate (M&S) for a three-block region of New York City. Let x i1 = 1 if there is an exact match between all three identifier fields, let x i2 = 1 if there is an exact match between the manhole types and numbers and the M&S plates are physically close to each other, etc. Given a sample of labeled pairs, where y i = 1 when the match is correct and y i = 0 otherwise, a classification problem can be formed as described in Chapter 4 .

Handling Unstructured Text

Much of the data generated by power companies is in the form of unstructured text. The data could include trouble tickets, inspection reports, and transcribed phone conversations with customers. The field of natural language processing involves using sophisticated clustering techniques, classification techniques, and language models to put unstructured text into structured tables that can be used for business intelligence applications. ConEdison, for instance, has generated over 140,000 free text documents describing power grid events over the last decade within Manhattan. These text documents contain the main descriptions of power grid failures on the low-voltage network and thus are a key source of data for power failure predictions. If these text documents can be translated into structured tables that can be used within a database, these text documents can become extremely valuable sources of data for studying and predicting power failures.

Rare Event Prediction

Many classification techniques (such as logistic regression) can fail badly when the data are severely imbalanced, meaning there are very few observations of one class. Power failures are rare events, so it can be difficult to characterize the class of rare events if very few (or none) have been observed. If failures happen only 1 percent of the time, a classification method that always predicts no failure is right 99 percent of the time, but it is completely useless in practice. This problem of imbalanced classification is discussed next.

Causal Inference

Many power companies are starting to take preemptive actions to reduce the risks of failure. These actions could include, for instance, equipment inspections or preemptive repairs. To justify the expenses of these programs, one must estimate the benefits they provide. Without such estimates, it is unclear how much benefit each program creates or indeed whether there is a benefit. For instance, on the New York City power grid, a study ( Rudin et al., 2012 ) called into question the practice of high potential (hipot) testing on live primary distribution cables. Hipot testing is where a live cable is given a much-higher-than-usual voltage, under the assumption that if the cable is weak it is more likely to fail during the test and can thus be replaced before it fails during normal operation. The problem is that the test itself can damage the cable. Other examples are manhole inspection programs and vented manhole cover replacement programs: To justify the costs of these programs, one needs to estimate their effectiveness. In this case, where the test itself does damage, predicting failures does not suffice; one needs to predict what would have happened to untreated cases had they been treated, and one needs to predict what would have happened to treated cases had they not been treated (the counterfactual).

Visualization and Interpretation of Results

Visualization of data is a key aspect of the knowledge discovery process. With ever more complex information arising from the power system, new ways of making sense of it are needed. For instance, for data from a distribution network such as New York’s, it is useful to visualize aspects of the electrical cables, manholes, geocoded locations of trouble tickets where problems arise, inspections, and more. Modern visualization tools can be interactive: One can probe data about local areas of the power grid or explore data surrounding the most vulnerable parts of the grid. One particular type of tool designed for New York City is called the “report card” tool ( Radeva et al., 2009 ). With this tool, an engineer can type in the identifier for a manhole and retrieve an automated report containing everything that must be known to judge the vulnerability of the manhole to future fires and explosions.

Machine-Learning Methods Comprehensible to Human Experts

Most of the top 10 algorithms in data mining ( Wu et al., 2008 ) produce black-box models that are highly complicated transformations of the input variables. Despite the high prediction quality of these methods, they are

often not useful for knowledge discovery because of their complexity, which can be a deal breaker for power grid engineers who will not trust a model they cannot understand.

It is possible that very interpretable yet accurate predictive models do exist (see Holt, 1993 , for instance). However, interpretable models are often necessarily sparse, so finding them is computationally hard. There is a fundamental trade-off between accuracy, interpretability, and computation; current machine-learning methods are very accurate and computationally tractable, but with tractability trade-offs or statistical approximations to reduce computation, it may be possible to attain models that are more interpretable and even more accurate.

The challenges above are not specific to New York; they are grand challenges that almost every power company for a major city faces. Solutions to the problems discussed here can be abstracted and used in many different settings.

CASE STUDY IN SYNCHROPHASORS

Hurricane Gustav made landfall near Cocodrie, Louisiana, at 9:30 a.m. CDT on September 1, 2008, as a strong category 2 storm (based on 110 mph sustained winds) and a central pressure of 955 millibars. 2 As usually happens with these types of events, there was significant damage to both electric transmission and distribution infrastructure. An example of the devastation is shown in Figure 7.4 .

For Entergy, the electric utility company operating in this area, Hurricane Gustav caused the second largest number of outages in company history, behind only Hurricane Katrina. Gustav restoration rivals the scale and difficulty of Hurricane Katrina restoration. 3 Unlike for previous storms, however, Entergy was able to utilize cutting-edge measurement technology to facilitate the restoration of its system. As the storm disrupted individual circuits, an electrical island was formed within Entergy’s service territory. What this means is that some generators were serving load using infrastructure that was electrically separated from the remainder of the interconnected power grid. Historically, this situation would have been difficult to manage in the control room, and it would likely have required de-energizing the loads, connecting the generators to the remainder of the grid, then reconnecting the load in the restoration sequence of events. However, because Entergy had previously deployed synchrophasor technology in its control room, the system operators were able to better observe the operation of the electrical island and utilize this information to facilitate its reconnection with the remainder of the grid as an intact electrical island.

Overview of Synchrophasors

As discussed in earlier chapters, a synchrophasor is a time-synchronized measurement of an electrical quantity, such as voltage or current. In addition to measuring the magnitude of the quantity being measured, the accurate time reference also measures the phase angle of that quantity. The enabling technology underlying this measurement approach is an accurate time reference. One common and ubiquitous time reference is the Global Positioning System, which provides microsecond-class timing accuracy. This is sufficient to measure phase angles with better than 1° accuracy. (For example, if the user desires to measure the angle with 1° accuracy on a 60-Hz system, the time error must be less than 4.6 μsec.)

The phasor measurement unit (PMU) can also calculate derived parameters associated with other electrical quantities, including frequency, rate of change of frequency, power, reactive power, and symmetrical components, by processing the raw voltage and current information that is measured by the instrument. Widely adopted standards, such as IEEE C37.118.1, govern the definition of these measurements. There are also different classes of PMUs that have been defined based on whether speed or accuracy is the primary consideration, given different assumptions that can be made by the equipment vendor for sampling and filtering algorithms. The M-class, for measurement, emphasizes accuracy, while the P-class, for protection, emphasizes speed of detection, which may sacrifice steady-state accuracy. Future modifications to these standards are defining dynamic performance requirements.

2 National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office, “Hurricane Gustav,” last modified September 1, 2010, http://www.srh.noaa.gov/lch/?n=gustavmain .

3 Entergy, “Hurricane Gustav,” http://entergy.com/2008_hurricanes/gustav_video_2.aspx . Accessed December 15, 2015.

There are other benefits of synchrophasors beyond those achievable from traditional measurements that are provided by SCADA telemetry. Because PMUs provide data with multiple frames per second (a modern PMU is capable of measuring at least 30 samples per second), dynamic characteristics of the power system can be measured. This is a valuable data source to calibrate dynamic power system models. Furthermore, accurately time-stamping the measurements can aid in the investigation of system disturbances (blackouts).

Internationally, the use of synchrophasors has been increasing dramatically in the past several years. After the technology was adopted and proven by early adopters over the past few decades, and with the cost of the technology steadily decreasing, more and more operational entities have adopted the technology. Some applications are given next.

Application of Synchrophasors

One of the first applications of this technology was to support planning engineers. Having high-speed, timestamped data was helpful for calibrating and validating dynamic models of the power system. New insights were gleaned concerning the dynamic behavior of the grid. Additionally, blackout investigations made extensive use of these measurements whenever they were available. The key attributes of the measurements sought for these applications were that they were high speed and time stamped.

One of the early applications in the power system control room was visualization to provide operators enhanced wide-area situational awareness. Because the relative phase angles between different regions of the power grid are directly proportional to the real power flowing across the network, displaying the phase angles across a wide-area power system depicts the power flowing across the network in a comprehensive and intuitive manner.

Also, because it is also affected by the net impedance between different points in the network, the phase angle can also serve as a proxy for system stress across critical boundaries. For example, given a constant power transfer across a corridor, if one of the lines is removed from service, the angle across the corridor will increase. Some utilities have adopted alarms and alerts for their operators based on measured phase angles.

Bringing synchrophasors directly into the state-estimation process can also improve the accuracy of those tools. Some utilities have deployed hybrid state estimation, where synchrophasor data are added to SCADA data in the state estimation, where others are evolving toward linear state estimators that are fed solely from PMUs. The linear state-estimation process can reduce measurement error by fitting the measured data to a real-time model of the power system.

More advanced applications are investigating the use of synchrophasors as inputs to Special Protection Systems. These schemes trigger automated responses based on real-time changes to system conditions. The synchrophasor data can arm the system and can also be used to trigger an automated response if that is appropriate.

Today PMUs are deployed primarily on the transmission system, but the industry is beginning to explore their use at the distribution level for power quality, demand response, microgrid operation, distributed generation integration, and enhanced distribution system visibility.

Mathematical Challenges to Improve Synchrophasor Measurements

Today’s synchrophasor measurement systems are governed by industry standards that define their accuracy requirements. 4 , 5 However, these accuracy requirements are only defined for steady-state measurements. In an attempt to reconcile the different applications of the measurements and how different vendors would make trade-offs in their sampling and filtering algorithms associated with speed and accuracy of the measurements, different classes of synchrophasor measurements have been defined. The so-called M-class (measurement) provides a more accurate estimate of the measurement but is allowed to take longer to converge on the measured value. The P-class (protection) is designed to operate faster and is primarily intended to quickly assess the new state of the system after a change in conditions, such as would occur during a fault or other system change. However, neither aforementioned class of measurements will necessarily provide consistent results between different vendor products for continuously time-variant conditions, such as a persistent dynamic instability, or in the presence of other imperfections in the measured signal, such as harmonics. Part of the challenge is that the entire premise of defining what a synchrophasor is applies only to a steady-state representation of the power system, and the changes are neither consistently nor comprehensively well defined. For example, the relationship between phase angle and frequency is not clearly defined whenever either of these parameters is changing. In much the same way that advanced mathematical algorithms are used to extract weak signals from a noisy environment in the communications domain, there is an opportunity for algorithmic advancement to provide a better foundation for extracting meaningful signals from power system measurements, particularly those associated with dynamical systems.

4 IEEE C37.118.1-2011 (IEEE Standard for Synchrophasor Measurements for Power Systems) and C37.118.1a-2014 (IEEE Standard for Synchrophasor Measurements for Power Systems—Amendment 1: Modification of Selected Performance Requirements).

5 International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) IEC 67850-90-5.

CASE STUDY IN INVERTER-BASED CONTROL FOR STABILIZING THE POWER SYSTEM

The committee considered two cases of power grid instability that could have been avoided with better analytical and mathematical tools. The first example is in Texas, where wind power farms in northwest Texas were producing power that is carried by weak transmission lines to the large load centers in east Texas (Dallas, Austin, Houston, San Antonio, and others). The turbines and the cables both have built-in controls to help dampen oscillations, in particular, in (1) the thyristor-controlled series capacitor (TCSC) transmission lines, which means that their line power flow can be directly controlled, and in (2) the doubly fed induction generators (DFIGs) of wind farms whose voltage is electronically, rather than mechanically, controlled. If any electrical signals vary from the control center’s reference settings, this needs to be remedied very quickly. The cables and the wind farms are equipped with fast electronic inverter-based controls, which change the stored energy in the equipment whose power is electronically controlled to push the signal back toward its reference settings. However, the controls on the Texas equipment did not work properly, and this led to oscillatory dynamics between the controllers of wind power farms and line flow controllers of weak transmission lines delivering wind power to the faraway loads such as Dallas. The new technical term for these instabilities is subsynchronous control instabilities, which had not been experienced by any power grid before the situation in Texas. For details of operational problems related to large wind power transfer in Texas, see ERCOT System Planning (2014) .

Similarly, in Germany, by government regulation, all of the wind power produced in the northwest of Germany must be delivered by the grid. However, the German power grid is not strong enough to handle this massive variability nor is it controlled online. Because of this, it is not always possible to deliver wind power to the major cities in the south of Germany (Munich in particular). Instead, power spills over to the Polish and Czech power systems, which complain about this and wish to build high-voltage dc tie links to block the German wind power from entering their grids. In addition, a serious problem of harmonic oscillations, similar to the problem observed in Texas, has been observed.

Situations like those in Texas and Germany could be avoided in the future if analytical capability in inverter-based control could be advanced—that is, the fast calculations performed in response to signals deviating from their reference settings. A lot of technology currently being developed will require inverter-based control. Mature versions of power inverter control are the automatic voltage regulators and power system stabilizers, both controls for exciters, of conventional power plants. More recent inverter control is being deployed for storage control of intermittent power plants, such as DFIGs and flywheels placed on wind power plants; for real and/or reactive power line flow and voltage control of series controllers, such as TCSCs and shunt capacitors (static var compensators); for control of storage placed on PVs; and for control of variable-speed drives ubiquitous to controllable loads, such as air conditioners, dryers, washers, and refrigerators. Recently there have been large investments in better switches, such as silicon nitride switches. For example, the National Science Foundation’s Energy Research Center for Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDM) system works on designing such switches and using them to control substation voltages and frequencies ( http://www.freedm.ncsu.edu ), and there are several efforts to design more durable and compact switches with higher voltage levels (ARPA-E’s GENI program is one).

The basic role of inverter control is unique in the sense that it is capable of controlling very fast system dynamics; the cumulative effects of kilohertz rate switching are capable of stabilizing fast frequency and voltage dynamics that are not otherwise controllable by slower controllers, in particular power plant governors. EPRI has led the way to Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS) design for several decades. Interestingly, the early work made the case for using FACTS to control line reactances, and, as such, being fundamental to increasing maximum power transfer possible by FACTS-equipped transmission lines. The decrease in line reactance directly increases power transfer by the line. More recently, there has been major research and development aimed at inverter-based control for microgrids, which is based on placing inverter controls on each PV and directly controlling reactive power-voltage (Q-V) and real power-angle (P-theta) transfer functions of closed-loop PVs (Consortium for Electric Reliability Technology Solutions-microgrid concept, http://certs.aeptechlab.com ). Similarly, when modeling inverter-based storage control (flywheels, DFIGs) it is assumed that voltage/reactive power and real power/energy can be controlled directly by inverters so that the closed-loop model is effectively a steady-state droop characteristic. An emerging idea is that

inverter-based control placed on direct-energy resources could be used to ensure stable response of power systems with massive deployment of intermittent resources; in effect, inverter-based control could replace inertial response of governor-controlled conventional power plants.

The approaches to stabilization in future power grids require careful new modeling and control design for guaranteed performance. As shown by the examples in Texas and Germany discussed above, at the lower distribution grid level, today’s inverter control practice of maintaining the PV power factor at unity has been known to result in unacceptable deviations of voltages close to the end users.

The problems in Texas and Germany are only early examples of the problems that could be caused by poor tuning of inverter control. They point to the need to model the dynamics relevant for inverter control to the level of detail necessary so that controllers are designed for provably stable response to each given range and type of disturbance. Some challenges are as follows:

• Modeling realistic fast dynamics. Most models currently used in control centers do not even attempt to model the fast dynamics relevant for assessing the performance of power electronically switched automation embedded in different components throughout the complex power grids. This is a very difficult problem since it requires accurate modeling of fast nonlinear dynamics and control design, which are often close to bifurcation point conditions. Some recently reported theoretical results on this topic were derived under highly unrealistic assumptions, such as “real-reactive power decoupling”—that the grid is entirely inductive (which is not possible when one relies on capacitive storage for voltage/reactive power control)—and that the loads are simple constant impedance loads. Modeling the fast dynamics with realistic assumptions and in a computationally fast way would be a big step forward.
• Aggregation of small inverter controllers. Another problem in power grids still to be studied concerns modeling dynamical effects of aggregate small inverter controllers on closed-loop dynamics in the grid. Modeling and designing switching control to avoid the real-world problems described above in using power electronics represents a grand challenge for modeling and computational methods. This challenge must be addressed if benefits from hardware improvements in power electronic switching are to be realized without excessive cost.

Abi-Samra, N., J. McConnach, S. Mukhopadhyay, and B. Wojszczyk. 2014. When the bough breaks: Managing extreme weather events affecting electrical power grids. IEEE Power and Energy Magazine 12(5):61-65.

DOE (U.S. Department of Energy). 2012. A Review of Power Outages and Restoration Following the June 2012 Derecho . August. http://www.oe.netl.doe.gov/docs/Derecho%202012_%20Review_080612.pdf .

ERCOT System Planning. 2014. Panhandle Renewable Energy Zone (PREZ) Study Report . http://www.ercot.com/content/news/presentations/2014/Panhandle%20REnewable%20Energy%20Zone%20Study%20Report.pdf .

Fink, L.H., and K. Carlsen. 1978. Operating under stress and strain. IEEE Spectrum 15(3):48-53.

Holt, R.C. 1993. Very simple classification rules perform well on most commonly used datasets. Machine Learning 11(1):63-90.

Kappenman, J. 2012. A perfect storm of planetary proportions. IEEE Spectrum , February. http://spectrum.ieee.org/magazine/2012/February .

NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation). 2010. High-Impact, Low-Frequency Event Risk to the North American Bulk Power System. A Jointly-Commissioned Summary Report of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s November 2009 Workshop. June. http://www.nerc.com/pa/CI/Resources/Documents/HILF%20Report.pdf .

NERC. 2012. Effects of Geomagnetic Disturbances on the Bulk Power System. Special Reliability Assessment Interim Report. February. http://www.nerc.com/files/2012GMD.pdf .

Radeva, A., C. Rudin, R. Passonneau, and D. Isaac. 2009. Report cards for manholes: Eliciting expert feedback for a machine learning task. Pp. 719-724 in International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications, 2009. ICMLA ‘09. doi:10.1109/ICMLA.2009.72.

Rudin, C., R. Passonneau, A. Radeva, H. Dutta, S. Ierome, and D. Isaac. 2010. A process for predicting manhole events in Manhattan. Machine Learning 80.

Rudin, C., D. Waltz, R.N. Anderson, A. Boulanger, A. Salleb-Aouissi, M. Chow, and H. Dutta. 2012. Machine learning for the New York City power grid. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 34(2): 328-345.

Rudin, C., S. Ertekin, R. Passonneau, A. Radeva, A. Tomar, B. Xie, and S. Lewis. 2014. Analytics for the power grid distribution reliability in New York City. Interfaces 44(4).

Stockton, P. 2014. E-Pro Handbook. Executive Summary. Electric Infrastructure Security (EIS) Council. http://www.eissummit.com/images/upload/conf/media/EPRO%20Handbook%20Executive%20Summary.pdf .

U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force. 2004. Final Report on the August 14, 2003, Blackout in the United States and Canada: Causes and Recommendations . http://energy.gov/oe/downloads/us-canada-power-system-outage-task-force-final-report-implementation-task-force .

Wu, X., V. Kumar, R. Quinlan, J. Ghosh, Q. Yang, H. Motoda, and G. Mclachlan. 2008. Top 10 algorithms in data mining. Knowledge and Information Systems 14:1-37.

Electricity is the lifeblood of modern society, and for the vast majority of people that electricity is obtained from large, interconnected power grids. However, the grid that was developed in the 20th century, and the incremental improvements made since then, including its underlying analytic foundations, is no longer adequate to completely meet the needs of the 21st century. The next-generation electric grid must be more flexible and resilient. While fossil fuels will have their place for decades to come, the grid of the future will need to accommodate a wider mix of more intermittent generating sources such as wind and distributed solar photovoltaics.

Achieving this grid of the future will require effort on several fronts. There is a need for continued shorter-term engineering research and development, building on the existing analytic foundations for the grid. But there is also a need for more fundamental research to expand these analytic foundations. Analytic Research Foundations for the Next-Generation Electric Grid provide guidance on the longer-term critical areas for research in mathematical and computational sciences that is needed for the next-generation grid. It offers recommendations that are designed to help direct future research as the grid evolves and to give the nation's research and development infrastructure the tools it needs to effectively develop, test, and use this research.

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2023-24 General Bulletin

Electrical Engineering, BSE

Degree:  Bachelor of Science in Engineering (BSE) Major:  Electrical Engineering

Program Overview

The Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree program with a major in Electrical Engineering provides our students with a broad foundation in electrical engineering through combined classroom and laboratory work which prepares our students for entering the profession of electrical engineering, as well as for further study at the graduate level.

The Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree program with a major in Electrical Engineering is accredited by the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET .

The Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering also offers a double major in Systems and Control Engineering and Electrical Engineering.

The educational mission of the electrical engineering program is to graduate students who have fundamental technical knowledge of their profession and the requisite technical breadth and communications skills to become leaders in creating the new techniques and technologies that will advance the general field of electrical engineering.

Program Educational Objectives

• Graduates will be successful professionals obtaining positions appropriate to their background, interests, and education.
• Graduates will use continuous learning opportunities to improve and enhance their professional skills.
• Graduates will demonstrate leadership in their profession.

Learning Outcomes

As preparation for achieving the above educational objectives, the Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree program with a major in Electrical Engineering is designed so that students attain:

• an ability to identify, formulate, and solve complex engineering problems by applying principles of engineering, science, and mathematics
• an ability to apply engineering design to produce solutions that meet specified needs with consideration of public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors
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• an ability to acquire and apply new knowledge as needed, using appropriate learning strategies.

Co-op and Internship Programs

Opportunities are available for students to alternate studies with work in industry or government as a co-op student, which involves paid full-time employment over seven months (one semester and one summer). Students may work in one or two co-ops, beginning in the third year of study. Co-ops provide students the opportunity to gain valuable hands-on experience in their field by completing a significant engineering project while receiving professional mentoring. During a co-op placement, students do not pay tuition but maintain their full-time student status while earning a salary. Alternatively or additionally, students may obtain employment as summer interns.

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Accelerated Master's Programs

Undergraduate students may participate in accelerated programs toward graduate or professional degrees. For more information and details of the policies and procedures related to accelerated studies, please visit the Undergraduate Academics section of the General Bulletin.

BS/MS Program in Electrical Engineering

The department encourages highly motivated and qualified students to apply for admission to the BS/MS Program in the junior year. This integrated program permits up to 9 credit hours of graduate level coursework to be counted towards both BS and MS degree requirements (including an option to substitute 3 credit hours of MS thesis work for ECSE 399 ). It also offers the opportunity to complete both the Bachelor of Science in Engineering and Master of Science degrees within five years.

Program Requirements

Students seeking to complete this major and degree program must meet the  general requirements for bachelor's degrees  and the  Unified General Education Requirements . Students completing this program as a  secondary major  while completing another undergraduate degree program do not need to satisfy the  school-specific requirements  associated with this major.

Major Requirements

Core courses provide our students with a strong background in signals and systems, computers, electronics (both analog and digital), and semiconductor devices. Students are required to develop depth in at least one of the following technical areas: signals and control, solid state, computer hardware, computer software, circuits, robotics, and biomedical applications. In addition to the core courses, each electrical engineering student must complete the following requirements:

Technical Elective Requirement

Each student must complete 18 credit hours of approved technical electives. Technical electives shall be chosen to fulfill the depth requirement (see next) and otherwise increase the student’s understanding of electrical engineering. Technical electives not used to satisfy the depth requirement are more generally defined as any course related to the principles and practice of electrical engineering. This includes all ECSE courses at the 200 level and above and can include courses from other programs. All non-ECSE technical electives must be approved by the student’s academic advisor.

Statistics Requirement

Design requirement.

In consultation with a faculty advisor, a student completes the program by selecting technical and open elective courses that provide in-depth training in one or more of a spectrum of specialties, such as, control, signal processing, electronics, integrated circuit design and fabrication, and robotics. With the approval of the advisor, a student may emphasize other specialties by selecting elective courses from other programs or departments.

Additionally, math and statistics classes are highly recommended as an integral part of the student's technical electives to prepare for work in industry and government and for graduate school. The following math/statistics classes are recommended and would be accepted as approved technical electives:

Other Math/Statistics courses may be used as technical electives with the approval of the student's academic advisor.

Many courses have integral or associated laboratories in which students gain “hands-on” experience with electrical engineering principles and instrumentation. Students have ready access to the teaching laboratory facilities and are encouraged to use them during non-scheduled hours in addition to the regularly scheduled laboratory sessions. Opportunities also exist for undergraduate student participation in the wide spectrum of research projects being conducted in the department.

Depth Requirement

Each student must show a depth of competence in one technical area by taking at least three courses from one of the following areas. This depth requirement may be met using a combination of the above core courses and a selection of open and technical electives. Alternative depth areas may be considered by petition to the program faculty.

Area I: Signals & Control

Area ii: computer software, area iii: solid state, area iv: circuits, area v: computer hardware, area vi: biomedical applications, area vii:  robotics, sample plan of study.

The following is a suggested program of study.  Current students should always consult their advisors and their individual graduation requirement plans as tracked in  SIS .

Unified General Education Requirement .

Students who have complementary interests in computer software or computer science can take  ECSE 132 / CSDS 132  as an alternative.

Selected students may be invited to take PHYS 123 and PHYS 124 in place of PHYS 121 and PHYS 122 .

Technical electives will be chosen to fulfill the depth requirement and otherwise increase the student’s understanding of electrical engineering. Courses used to satisfy the depth requirement must come from the department’s list of depth areas and related courses. Technical electives not used to satisfy the depth requirement are more generally defined as any course related to the principles and practice of electrical engineering. This includes all ECSE courses at the 200 level and above, and can include courses from other programs. All non-ECSE technical electives must be approved by the student’s advisor.

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Looking to expand your options with a minor in Electrical, Computer or Systems Engineering? Explore options and minor requirements in the university's General Bulletin.

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BSE in Electrical Engineering

In our Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree program, you can major in electrical engineering and gain a broad foundation in the field through combined classroom and laboratory work. Our program prepares you to enter the profession or pursue a graduate degree.

We provide the education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global, economic, environmental and societal context. Through our courses, you’ll learn sensory processing, pipelining, digital communications and more. 

In the electrical engineering major, you’ll hone your focus in at least one of the following areas: 

Signals and systems

Solid state

Computer hardware

Computer software

Biomedical applications

Electrical BSE Apply

Learn more and apply now.

Ready to start engineering your future at Case Western Reserve? Learn more about how to apply.

Electrical BSE Contact

Admissions Find your geographic-specific admissions counselor here , or contact [email protected] .

Electrical BSE Faculty

Meet faculty.

Meet the field-leading faculty members who will be your teachers and mentors.

Many of our courses have integral or associated laboratories in which you can gain direct experience with electrical engineering principles and instrumentation. You’ll have ready access to the teaching laboratory facilities and are encouraged to use them during non-scheduled hours in addition to the regularly scheduled laboratory sessions.

You also can apply your drive and education by taking part in the wide spectrum of research projects being conducted in our department. 

Alternate your studies with work in industry or government as a co-op student, which involves paid full-time employment over seven months (one semester and one summer). Starting in your third year, you can work in one or two co-ops.

In this program, you will gain valuable experience in the field by completing a significant engineering project while receiving professional mentoring. During a co-op placement, you do not pay tuition but maintain your full-time student status while earning a salary. 

Learn more about our Co-op Program at engineering.case.edu/coop . 

The Bachelor of Science degree program in Electrical Engineering is accredited by the Computing Accreditation Commission of ABET . 

Explore degree requirements, courses and more in the university’s General Bulletin

Degree FAQs

Visit the Office of Undergraduate Admissions to apply and learn more about admissions requirements. 

When you’re ready, the Office of Undergraduate Studies will guide you through the process .

Visit the university's General Bulletin for specific course requirements.

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Business Case Study UI/UX

Case Study: THT. Website Design for Electrical Engineering Service

The case study unveils the process of website design and custom graphics for tht, the company that makes electronics and prototypes breathing life into innovative products..

Welcome to take a glance at one of our recent projects, created at the crossroads of the practical and creative, design and engineering. In this case study, we unveil the story of website design for THT, the company making electronics that breathe life into innovative products.

Client and Project

THT is a USA-based team that offers electrical engineering and firmware development and services that span from proof-of-concept prototyping to designs for mass production. As they describe themselves, they are committed to producing reliable technology that performs at the highest standard, with honest, well-organized, clearly documented, and trustworthy work. They back clients who they believe in and whose goals they can achieve.

The THT team approached us with the request for their website design to amplify their online presence, highlight the benefits of the service, tell about the projects that were already accomplished, and enhance communication with their customers. As well, we implemented the website on Webflow .

The creative team for the project from the tubik side included Sergii Kucherenko, Daria Tsehelna, Maryna Solomennikova, Kirill Erokhin, Anton Chirskii, and Nick Zhuravlov.

Website Design

The general visual and interaction design for the THT website is based on the following points:

• the solid visual hierarchy that makes the web pages highly scannable and allows website visitors to quickly get into the essence of the service
• simple, elegant, and readable typography corresponding to the theme and not distracting visitors with decorative elements
• the deep dark color palette and the balanced usage of stylish gradients
• well-arranged content allowing for quick skimming and uniting different sections into the integral user experience
• effective and consistent graphics performance and custom visual elements for the original presentation
• smooth, catchy web motion effects

Altogether, those factors do their best for the website to make it present the essence and benefits of the service, engage visitors, and set a quick and strong emotional connection.

The typography choice fell on Alliance, the sans serif typeface flexible for various goals and providing good legibility in both short and large texts.

And here’s a glance at the colors used for the website, deep, eye-pleasing, and providing a good background for various visuals and text blocks.

The home page of the website presents an overview of the services the company provides and the portfolio of completed projects. The hero section features a prominent custom illustration our team made to set the topic and activate instant visual connection to the theme of electronics, devices, and digital technologies even before the visitor reads the text. The image is supported with the blog tagline, a short, concise text block unveiling the main idea of the company activity, and a noticeable call-to-action button for those who want to connect the team right from the point.

Scrolling the page down, the visitors can learn more about what the company can help with; all the services are well-organized in a clear, digestible list supported with neat line graphics. The following Portfolio section shows up the cards with project previews. All preview cards are endowed with special custom illustrations in one style, which helps to reach visual consistency and integrity.

And here’s how web animation helps make the experience even more dynamic and impressive on the home page of the THT website.

Here’s a glance at the particular project page in the portfolio. It echoes the visual style set on the home page, with neatly arranged, hierarchic text blocks, illustrative and photo content, and supportive line graphics.

Here’s an example of the page presenting the tool dealing with different data. For the design here, we had to consider various types of infographics and stats that would look clear and consistent.

Another interesting design point to mention is the animation of the interactions with the tabs of different projects, imitating a sort of curtain moving up and opening an extensive preview of the project.

In the structure of the company website, a contact page is usually quite simple. Still, it has great importance as it sets the direct communication with the potential customer, so it’s crucial not to overdesign it to make the page fast to load, informative, and functional. That’s also the idea behind the contact page for the THT website: a contact form is added to the page to let the visitor quickly send the message right from there, or they could choose from other convenient methods like writing an email, giving a call, or arranging an online meeting.

All website pages are adapted to the efficient mobile experience to make the design work at its full and let the brand communicate successfully on any device.

All the design solutions were implemented by our team with the help of Webflow , which ensured that designers kept their eye on the slightest details of the development process.

New design case studies from our team are coming soon. Stay tuned!

More Design Case Studies

Here’s a set of more case studies sharing the design solutions and approaches for some of the design projects done by the Tubik team.

Glup. Delivery App Branding and UX Design

Komuso. Website Design for Wellness Tool

PointZero25. Identity and Website Design for Event Agency

Nonconventional Show. Website Design for Podcast

uMake. Branding and Website for 3D Design Tool

BEGG. Brand Packaging and Web Design for Food Product Ecommerce

Crezco. Brand Identity and UI/UX Design for Fintech Service

FarmSense. Identity and Web Design for Agricultural Technology

Carricare. Identity and UX Design for Safe Delivery Service

OOP. Brand Identity Design for Online Flea Market

Otozen. Mobile App Design for Safe Driving

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Welcome to check designs by Tubik on Dribbble and Behance ; explore the gallery of 2D and 3D art by Tubik Arts on Dribbble

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8 Typography Tips For Designers: How to Make Fonts Speak

The fresh article devoted to the theme of UI typography: read the collection of tips about making typography functional and harmonic in user interfaces for web and mobile.

Case Study: Letter Bounce. UI Design for a Mobile Game

Graphic and UI design case study devoted to the crossword mobile game Letter Bounce: check the bright clear interface, animations, mascot, and illustrated map.

Case Study: ToyJoy. Ecommerce Website of Toys for Adults

Case study on daring and sexy design for the e-commerce website selling toys for adults, balancing elegance, style, and emotional appeal in each and every detail.

Color Matters. 6 Tips on Choosing UI Colors

The article reveals six tips on choosing colors for mobile and web interfaces. It shows techniques helping UI designers to boost user interest to a product.

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Electrical Engineering Case Study

Introduction.

Engineers have the potential of developing technology that will be used by hundreds, thousands, even millions of people. Since so many people are using this technology, it has to be safe and It has to benefit one population without making another suffer. As the engineers design new technology, they are the ones that have an ethical responsibility to ensure that It will not endanger lives or cause any suffering. The purpose of the essay is to explore the specific issues that face electrical engineers.

The primary focus in this essay will be addressing the question: how can an issue be an ethical concern if it does not directly endanger human life or society? This is particularly important as in contrast to other branches of engineering, the moral issues surrounding electrical engineering do not usually affect a consumer’s health or lead to injury or death. A civil engineering dilemma could involve a building collapsing or roads falling apart leading to direct death or injury, such as the “Luminance Plaza Collapse”l in Connecticut, or the “Sampson Department Store Collapse”2 In Seoul. However, as discussed In Flanders 3, the problems faced by electrical engineers are no less Important, and that the engineers In this discipline should be aware of the particular ethical dilemmas of this field. The field of electrical engineering covers a wide range of technology from power generation and transmission lines to integrated circuits used in computers. This essay will outline, using real-life examples, three major concerns in electrical engineering and explain how they impact the world on an international scale.

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The current solutions to the ethical dilemmas will be evaluated using ethical analysis, and alternative solutions will be provided.

The following scenarios are an excellent illustration of the ethical issues that electrical engineers have to face and opens up a unique discussion about their responsibilities in both a national and international setting.

Issue 1 – Quality of product vs. Commercial success

Electrical engineers are Involved in the manufacturing of everyday household appliances. The circuitry that is designed Is used In products that are sold by the manufacturer. Manufacturer’s can powerless the commercial success of their product ever the actual quality.

This can result in a conflict of interest between manufacturer and engineer since the manufacturer can be financially motivated, whereas an engineer is supposed to hold paramount the welfare of public in their professional duties.

An example of this is the manufacturing of the Intel microprocessor in 19944.

The microprocessor had a flaw in it that meant that a regularly used operation by users would give the incorrect results. The engineers knew of this problem, and rectified it for future version. Despite this, Intel continued ailing the product. This error was found by users, and Intel decided it would only replace microprocessor with a good one to people who could demonstrate that they needed It. Should Intel have provided a replacement regardless? Since Intel was aware of the problem, was It unethical to withhold this Information from the users? If this Information had been given, and warnings had been Included, does this solve the ethical problems for the company?

According to Intel, since the error was so melon It would not affect ten majority AT users. However ten Tee people would nave suffered’ from this flaw could have been rectified if Intel had offered to replace their microprocessor for free.

This is what Intel did do and so according to utilitarianism principles their response was ethically sound. However, what was immoral was the fact that they did not bring up this issue themselves, and that they continued manufacturing and selling the product without warnings. They did not respect the dignity of their consumers enough to let them be informed consumers.

By applying Kantian ethics, one can determine that Intel did not respect the dignity of their customers, and was merely using them as a means to an end. This was to maximize their profit margin by exhausting their faulty stock.

There are a number of alternative solutions that Intel could have taken. Intel could have continued selling their product with a warning label so that further customer’s would be aware of flaw. A better solution would have been if Intel discontinued making this microprocessor and told their customers of the flaw straight away, whilst also offering a replacement chip.

Issue 2 – experimental nature of electrical

The technology used by engineers to design equipment is complex, and outside the understanding of a majority of general consumers. In addition to this, the lasting effect of some of these technologies is unknown. Since electrical technology is designed on such a small scale, there can be unknown effects due to our limited understanding of quantum physics.

This raises an interesting issue that has sparked debate. Can we use technology that we don’t fully understand, but use on a daily basis?

Is it safe to use this technology considering that there may be a potential risk that we have yet to comprehend? The nature of electrical engineering can be somewhat experimental. Transmission lines are used every day to transfer energy into our homes. There are inconclusive theories that suggests that these transmission lines which emit low-frequency electromagnetic radiation can be harmful to the general population. This ranges from causing headaches and muscles fatigue to an increased risk of cancer.

Is an engineer obliged to consider these potential risks in their design, even if there is little proof or knowledge into the lasting effects? Currently transmission lines are designed so that they are around 5-10 meters off the ground, this is both for efficiency as well as to remove them from he reach of the general public, avoiding electrocution. However, not many transmission lines have shielding to reduce or eliminate the effects of electromagnetic fields, as there is no quantitative evidence to suggest that shielding is necessary.

If the observational theories were proven to be true, however unlikely, that would mean that the general public have been placed in a position of possible harm. In the unlikely case this was true, does the small probability of this being true outweigh the seriousness of the potential harm. An engineer should be orally responsible at all times, and so an engineer should employ some sort of safety measure. Even if there is only a tiny potential for transmission lines to have lasting negative effects, there should be methods used to combat this threat.

This is applying contractual principles. If engineers themselves believed that they could be exposed to these harmful effects, and knew that they could do something about it, they would integrate some shielding into their transmission line design.

Issue 3 – sustainability and power generation, impact of cheap labor

Power generation and sustainable TTY Is a Key concern Tort all people In ten world Electrical engineers are a vital part of this global machine concerned with sustainability. Engineers primarily concern themselves with providing the most efficient means of power generation and distribution, but this can cause negative effects on the global community.

Can a balance be achieved? Is it possible for an electrical engineer to be morally responsible at all time? Our current primary energy source is dependent on a limited resource, coal and fossil fuels. The utilization of these materials results in emissions ND waste that are harmful to the environment.

Since an electrical engineer is only concerned with the production of energy and not of its disposal is this even an issue they should concern themselves with? It’s not Just up to one person to be ethically responsible.

An engineer is only a small part of a network of morally autonomous agents. An engineer can apply virtue ethics or Kantian ethics, and create awareness of environmental issues. An engineer should have a virtuous nature and consider all areas of society that they can impact. If an engineer applies Kantian, their actions loud involve trying to tell their managers that they are using the Earth’s limited resources as a means to an end, and the environment gets negatively affected by this. If an engineer raises concern about environmental issues, then they are ethically sound.

Even if the situation does not change due to the opinions of higher up people, the engineer has done all that they can be expected to.

Cheap Labor: An example of our global effect is found in a youth videos where cheap child labor is used to break down parts in a circuit board for further use. The toxic fumes emitted from deconstructing the components are extremely hazardous and can cause lasting health consequences. Companies source labor to developing countries because it is an extremely economical alternative.

This is primarily due to developing nations not having as stringent workplace health and safety requirements, and also being able to obtain workers who would work for a much lower wage. Essentially this action will achieve the same outcome, for a lesser cost.

These companies clearly priorities profit margins over social wellbeing. Is this an electrical engineers concern? An electrical engineer is part of the company that sakes the decision to employ cheap labor, and so they can be in a position to influence this decision.

A number of options are available. Employ 1st world employees to perform the same Job locally This will mean that there is a higher cost for the company. However, this will take away work from third work countries. Cheap labor will no longer be exploited, but the people of the country will no longer have employment, which could have serious roll-over effects on the society and economy.

A better solution would be: Employ 3rd world employees, and provide better wages and working conditions.

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• Engineering Ethics Cases
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• Engineering Ethics

The following series of engineering ethics cases were created by interviewing numerous engineers from Silicon Valley and beyond.

The cases have been written, anonymized, and honed to highlight the ethical content from each interview. While these cases are meant for engineering students and professionals for their professional development, nearly all of the cases occur in the context of business, and therefore are also relevant for those seeking business ethics cases.

These cases are suitable as homework and/or for classroom discussion. The goal of this project is to acquaint engineering students and professionals with the variety of ethical experiences of engineering as practiced “in the field.” By becoming familiar with problems faced by other engineers we hope to thereby prepare those reading these cases if they too encounter difficult ethical dilemmas in their work.

Cases range from the mundane to the deadly. While we do not reveal how each particular case turned out, in general they turned out well – the people involved made the right decisions. But this is not to say that all of these right decisions came without personal cost. A few of the engineers did face negative repercussions and a very few even needed to find new employment. However, overall the interviewees were satisfied with how events turned out, even if they faced negative repercussions for their good decisions. They understood that doing the right thing is good in itself, regardless of the personal consequences they may have faced.

The engineering ethics cases can be sorted into the following categories:

• Academic Ethics
• Bioengineering
• Business Ethics
• Civil Engineering
• Computer/Software Engineering
• Electrical Engineering
• International
• Mechanical Engineering
• Science/Research Ethics

A quality assurance engineer must decide whether or not to ship products that might be defective.

An intern at a power electronics startup faces unkind comments from a fellow engineer. She suspects that her colleague is prejudice toward female engineers.

A chemical engineering professor discovers that a colleague has taken credit for his research.

A bioengineering researcher discovers an error in protocol and feels pressured not to report it to her supervisor.

A graduate student suspects her research adviser has earned tenure under false pretenses.

A computer startup company risks violating copyright laws if it reuses a code that is the intellectual property of another company.

A recently promoted manager at an industrial engineering company discovers that factory workers are asked to work more than eight hours a day without getting paid overtime.

Full transparency might prevent a project leader from closing a deal with a valuable client. Should he still clarify the situation to his client?

A manager at a consumer electronics company struggles over whether or not he should disclose confidential information to a valued customer.

A medical researcher is asked to trim data before presenting it to the scientific advisory board.

A technical sales engineer feels pressure to falsify a sales report in order to prevent the delay of her company's IPO.

When a computer filled with personal data gets stolen, a data company must decide how to manage the breach in security.

Employees of a computer hardware company are angered by a manager that demonstrates favoritism.

A project engineer believes his company is providing the wrong form of technology to an in-need community in East Africa.

A computer engineer is asked to divulge private medical data for marketing purposes.

Environmental engineers face pressure to come up with data that favors their employers.

In this ethics case, a woman is displeased with her work role at a computer hardware company.

A systems engineering company employee quits after getting pressured to falsify product testing paperwork.

A manager at a nonprofit mechanical engineering firm questions how responsible her company should be for ongoing maintenance on past projects.

An engineer for an environmental consulting firm must decide whether or not he should encourage his client to go with a more environmentally sustainable construction plan.

A genetic engineer feels a responsibility to educate colleagues on the truth behind stem cell research.

An engineering manager gets pressured to bribe a foreign official in order to secure a business venture in East Africa.

An African-American electronics design lead wonders whether his colleague's contentious behavior is motivated by racism.

A medical company asks blood sample suppliers to sign an ethically questionable consent form.

A quality assurance tester gets pressured to falsify data about a new product from a major cell phone company.

Should a production engineer prioritize a customer's desires over safety?

A female intern at a construction company faces disrespectful treatment because of her gender.

A new hire at an electronics startup struggles to decide between telling the truth and maximizing the company's profit.

A fellow for a global services program faces an ethical dilemma when a colleague asks him to falsify receipts.

A researcher of regenerative medicine meets a man who is eager sign up for potentially dangerous human testing.

A bioengineer's research leads to the discovery that a patient might have prostate cancer.

Two support engineers at a South Bay audio visual electronics startup question the fairness of a supervisor's decision.

An employee overseeing data analysis on a clinical drug trial has concerns about the safety of a client's drug.

The engineering ethics cases in this series were written by Santa Clara University School of Engineering students Clare Bartlett, Nabilah Deen, and Jocelyn Tan, who worked as Hackworth Engineering Ethics Fellows at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics over the course of the 2014-2015 academic year. In order to write these cases, the fellows interviewed numerous engineers and collected nearly 40 engineering ethics cases from Silicon Valley and beyond.  The Hackworth Fellowships are made possible by a generous gift from Joan and the late Michael Hackworth.

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