Quick Disconnect System for Power Distribution Hardening and Resiliency

Recent data shows that reported natural disasters have nearly ten-folded over the past century. Aside from the threat to human lives, they pose a great threat to America's infrastructure and power grid. Nearly 90% of all power interruption occurs at the distribution level and over 75% of these are weather related. The proposed Phase I effort aims to combat these unavoidable threats by developing a quick disconnect system for utility power distribution cables. The main goal of the innovation is to allow the power cable and support structure to become disengaged safely by adhering to all applicable OSHA, ANSI, IEEE and environmental standards; reliably by implementing both automated disengagement, triggered by detection of critical loads, and mechanical disengagement, resulting from critical loads applied to the cable/support structure; all without causing damage to the cables/support structures. The proposed solution shall create no interference with normal operation by utilizing self-power generation, low maintenance requirements, and an architecture that can be retrofitted to current cable/support structure designs. In the event that restoration is necessary, the proposed solution will be able to be reconfigured with no special tools allowing restoration efforts to be as quick and efficient as possible. The Phase I efforts seeks to show the feasibility of the proposed Quick Disconnect System which possesses a high TRL because the Phase I design can be developed using nearly all OTS hardware and electronics. Phase II seeks to refine, optimize and finalize its design as an immediate means of increasing distribution network resiliency.