Rodrigo Moreno gets funding for Power Electricity Systems Project

FCFM’s Electrical Engineering Department assistant professor Rodrigo Moreno won the Newton-Picarte fund derived from the association between Conicyt and Research Councils UK (RCUK). The funding will allow him to carry out the “Disaster management and resilience in power electricity” project, a collaborative effort between the University of Manchester and Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Regarding the funding, Rodrigo Moreno states that the acknowledgment “strengthens a fruitful relation between our faculty and some of the best institutions in the United Kingdom, thus establishing a very beneficial alliance for our academic community”.

The funding, which according to the researcher “is mainly destined to the development of cutting-edge research through collaboration of Chilean and British institutions” will allow to undertake “the challenge of merging technical knowledge in the areas of planning and operation of power electricity systems and concepts developed in civil engineering so as to understand the impact of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, in the electric infrastructure and their propagation potential to the rest of the system, including impact on the end user”, Moreno states. The goal is to quantify natural disaster-related risks to which the system is exposed, developing new optimization models to improve its design and planning in order to make it more resilient in the long term.

This multidisciplinary task, which will take place between 2016 and 2017, will be carried out by a research team encompassing electric, civil, math, and industrial engineers, as well as economists from three academic institutions: Universidad de Chile, Pontificia Universidad Católica and University of Manchester.