Bidram, Reimer & Khalili Win Best Paper at KPEC

December 10, 2020

Bidram, Reimer & Khalili Win Best Paper at KPEC

ECE Graduate Research Assistants Benjamin Reimer, Tohid Khalili and ECE Asst Professor Ali Bidram were awarded the Best Paper Award at the 2020 IEEE Kansas Power and Energy Conference that took place (virtually) on July 13, 2020.

They shared the award with Matthew J. Reno and Ronald C. Matthews who work at Sandia National Laboratories.

Dr. Bidram provided the following explanation of the paper in a recent e-mail exchange, "Power system protection is a critical component of power grids to provide a reliable supply of power to the customers. In a protection system, relays are the key devices that protect specific power system apparatus. This paper proposes an optimal relay placement approach for microgrids. The proposed approach considers both grid-connected and islanded microgrid modes. The algorithm separately calculates the System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI) of a microgrid in each operating mode. The objective is to find the optimal relay locations such that the microgrid overall SAIFI is minimized. The exchange market algorithm (EMA) is used for optimizing functions. The effectiveness of the proposed optimal relay placement approach is verified using an 18-bus microgrid and IEEE 123-bus test system."  

Please click this sentence to access the entire paper, which has been archived in IEEE Xplore.

Tohid Khalili is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree as a research assistant at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA. He received a B.Sc. degree from Urmia University, Urmia, Iran, in 2016, and an M.Sc. degree from the University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran, in 2018, both in electrical engineering (power systems).

Khalili is the author and co-author of several journals and conference papers. His main research interests include optimization, reliability, robustness, resiliency, and protection of power systems, power systems operation, demand response programs, renewable energy, energy storage systems, smart grid, evolutionary algorithms, and power systems economic.      

Benjamin Reimer is a Graduate Research Assistant at The University of New Mexico Operations Intern at CFV Labs. He got his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering in 2020 and is currently working as an engineer at PNM.

The 1st Annual Power and Energy Conference at Kansas State University, KPEC was a symposium of the research behind technologies for power and energy systems of the future.

Its next conference is scheduled for April 19 and 20, 2021 and will gather experts from academia and industry to present their latest ideas and to engage in professional discourse.

KPECaward