Enhancing Power Grid Reliability With Real-time Edge Compression

Session Category Other Open Source Sessions Room 301 Audience All Attendees Time Slot Sat 2:00pm to 2:45pm (11/8/25)

Across the power grid infrastructure, deployed power transmission systems are susceptible to incipient faults that interrupt standard operations. These incipient faults can range from being benign in impact to causing massive hardware damage and even loss of life. The power grid is continuously monitored, and incipient faults are recorded by Digital Fault Recorders (DFRs) to mitigate such outcomes. DFR-recorded data allow for power quality forensics and event analysis, but this ability comes at the cost of high data storage and data transmission requirements. It is common for data older than two weeks to be overwritten due to storage limitations, without being analyzed. This inhibits the creation of long-term data libraries that would enable incipient fault forensics and the characterization of behavior that precedes them, which limits the development and implementation of preventive measures; thus, there is a critical need to reduce DFR-recorded data’s storage requirements. This work addresses this critical need by leveraging the cyclic and residual histograms and introducing the frequency and Root Means Squared (RMS) histograms, which alleviate the current high data storage requirements and provide effective Incipient Fault Prediction (IFP). The residual, frequency, and RMS histograms are an extension of the cyclic histogram, reduce the data storage requirement by up to 99.58%, can be generated on the DFR without interrupting its normal operations, and are capable of predicting voltage arcing six hours before it is strong enough to trigger a DFR-recorded event.

About the Speaker

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Joshua Tyler

Postdoctoral Researcher in Electrical Engineering at The University of Tennessee at Chattanoga

Chattanooga, TN

Joshua H. Tyler, PhD. is a postdoctoral researcher, adjunct faculty member, and entrepreneurial fellow at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Joshua received his BS and MS degree in Electrical Engineering at UT Chattanooga in May 2020 and December 2022, respectively. He earned his Doctorate in Computational Science with a focus in Computational Engineering at UT Chattanooga in May 2025.

Joshua's research interests focus on improving the reliability and security of electrical-based critical infrastructure. This focus has included efforts in enhancing power grid reliability, cryptography, and Specific Emitter Identification (SEI). Additionally, Joshua worked with SCalable Asymmetric Lifestyle Engagement (SCALE) to help research radiation effects on communication hardware deployed in space-fairing vehicles.

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