OKLAHOMA: Researchers study rare ice storm
Oklahoma EPSCoR researchers study rare October 2020 ice storm that caused widespread damage in OK. Dr. Muralee Muraleetharan from the University of Oklahoma’s School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science led a team of research scientists, postdoc, and students to quantitatively assess and recommend measures to enhance the ice storm resilience of power distribution systems. More
Simulations have shown the possibility of reducing customer outages by employing automatic feeder switching that selectively ties adjacent substations to back-feed the network in future designs.
The research team also developed a probabilistic framework to assess and enhance the resilience of power distribution systems subjected to ice storms including ice storm characterization, component (trees, poles, and wires) fragility models, power distribution system performance model, system restoration model and resilience enhancement.