BLACKSBURG, Va. – Nobody likes dealing with power outages, especially for days on end, but ongoing research at Virginia Tech could help that go away.
After the recent winter storm, people across our region struggled with downed power lines and outages for days.
“It costs something like 150 billion dollars a year that we spend when power goes out,” said Joseph Vantassel, assistant professor and researcher for the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech.
In a way to mitigate the routine of recovery after winter storms, researchers from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech are looking at how to put power lines underground more easily than how it’s done now.
“If we can take the large lines that are carrying a lot of power from the generation point and put those underground, we can substantially reduce the amount of downtime,” said Vantassel.
A $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy is funding this project.
Researchers are using two different sensors, one radar and another using vibration, to look ahead as workers drill underneath the ground to install the lines.
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“You can actually tap, say with this, and you’ll see that has actually beeped now on that side meaning that the wave has been measured,” Vantassel said. “These are all the individual sensors so we kind of time coming down here and the different sensors there,” he added. “Basically just push this cart and this kind of drags along the ground here and then if you’ll see this little parabolic shape, this downward shape, and it is indicating that that’s where that wire was.”
He said while this is still early on in the three-year project, this could save billions of dollars across the United States.
He said the end goal is to be able to have 3-D models of what’s underneath the ground for workers to be able to operate.
