Industry-sponsored student projects to promote power quality education

The authors present the results of two industry-sponsored senior design projects on power quality: effect of harmonic current distortion on power transformer capability, sponsored by the Philadelphia Electric Company (PECO); and power quality survey of a commercial system, sponsored by BCM engineers. The objective of the first project was to investigate the effect of harmonic current distortion on the capabilities of critical power transformers that service computing equipment in the corporate headquarters of PECO. The objective of the second project was to conduct a power quality survey of the BCM system to ascertain whether power line disturbances were the causes of outages and failures of essential BCM computing facilities. Each project had its own power line monitor. The success of these student projects has promoted interest in power engineering as a career for many of the group members and generated enrollment in the senior-level power program