Ahmad Abdullah, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, was the winner in the engineering category of the first Society for Underwater Technology (SUT)-TAMU chapter Student Paper Contest.
Abdullah’s paper was titled “A Cost Effective and Environmentally Attractive Approach for Cable Protection in Off-Shore Wind Farms.”
In his paper, Abdullah explains how an offshore wind farm consists of groups of wind turbines and each group consists of a certain number of these turbines connected to the same cable. All cables terminate on one node called point of common coupling that connects to the low voltage side of the offshore wind farm’s main transformer. He shows that by processing the oscillating frequency components generated by fault currents in the node it allows the detecting of faults on different cables. This effectively corresponds to installing one protective relay to detect faults on all offshore wind farm cables, which drastically minimizes the cost and simplifies the wiring.
Abdullah received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Department of Electrical Power and Machines in the Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, in 2009 and 2012, respectively.
He is currently a research and teaching assistant seeking his Ph.D. in the department. His research interests include: power system protection; power system stability and control; digital signal processing; and FACTS and HVDC.
The SUT is a multidisciplinary learned society that brings together organizations and individuals with a common interest in underwater technology, ocean science and offshore engineering.