Professor receives $175,000 for electrical system research

JONESBORO — The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $175,000 federal grant from the NSF’s Division of Computer and Network Systems to Rasoul Narimani, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Arkansas State University, to conduct research that will contribute to the reliability of electrical power systems.

Narimani said that this was the first time writing a grant proposal for himself.

He said that a friend had told him of a grant program for junior faculty in which the research overlapped his own research.

Starting at the beginning of April, Narimani will serve as principal investigator for the two-year project, which is partially funded under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 as well.

“This project aims to strengthen dependability and robustness of the electric power grid by improving the capability to aggregate power system state estimation (PSSE) methods to monitor and assess the health of a power grid,” Narimani said, noting that the cyber-physical system has layers such as the power and communication systems and his method will help strengthen the safeguards so that if one layer is hit power can be transitioned to another.

“The electric power grid is a cyber-physical system, essential for modern daily life,” he said. “The grid is arguably the largest global engineered structure.”

“The goals of this project are to understand vulnerabilities intrinsic to traditional PSSE methods and improve the dependability and robustness of PSSE algorithms to potentially disruptive conditions,” Narimani said.

He said that his proposal includes three different steps: design a sophisticated attack, improve the safeguards and transition between operation points, which includes checking the feasibility of transfer between points.

The project extends recently developed power system optimization techniques to enable better situational awareness of the operations of the overall power system.

Narimani said, “This will be good for the College of Engineering and junior faculty as it will help to hire two more students for the department as well as allow them to visit K-12 classes and talk with students about engineering.”

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Narimani and his research team will work with AState’s outreach program, “P-20 Educational Innovation Center,” to share their research and encourage students to pursue careers in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

Narimani joined A-State’s faculty in the College of Engineering and Computer Science in August 2021.

He completed his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.

He also completed a postdoctoral appointment at Texas A& M University before moving to Jonesboro.

He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Society for Engineering Education.