Yilu Liu led the effort to create the North American power grid Frequency Monitoring Network or FNET and is known for her research on electric power systems and smart grids.
Liu was named an IEEE Fellow in 2003 and she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2016 for innovations in electric power grid monitoring, situational awareness, and dynamic modelling.
Liu will deliver the Vanderbilt School of Engineering’s fall 2021 John R. and Donna S. Hall Engineering Lecture on Monday, Nov. 8, at 4 p.m. CT. Her lecture—Benefit of Grid Edge Synchronized Measurements—is free and open to the public. Register for the live webinar here.
She will provide an overview on the effort of power grid wide-area monitoring and observations that were made possible from the grid edge synchronized data. The critical roles of wide-area phasor measurement in situation awareness, operation, and control will be discussed.
The concept of electromechanical wave propagation in power grid will be demonstrated using measurement data collected from the actual grids. Applications of time synchronized data in event location, oscillation location detection, model validation, and high renewable grids will be discussed.
Liu is the UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She also is the deputy director of the Department of Energy/National Science Foundation cofunded engineering research center CURENT, the Center for Ultra-Wide-Area Resilient Electric Energy Transmission Networks.
Operated by the Power Information Technology Laboratory at the University of Tennessee, FNET is now known as FNET/GridEye. It is a low-cost, quickly deployable GPS-synchronized wide-area power system frequency measurement network. High dynamic accuracy frequency disturbance recorders (FDRs) are used to measure the frequency, phase angle, and voltage of the power system at ordinary 120V outlets.
The measurement data are continuously transmitted via the Internet to the FNET/GridEye servers hosted at the University of Tennessee and Virginia Tech. The system is able to measure the power system frequency, voltage, and angle very accurately.
FNET/GridEye has been assisting real time situational awareness and helping improve reliability in many power grids for 17 years. To aid operators confronting challenges from growing renewables, the system continues increasing its measurement accuracy and enhancing its functionalities.
In 2020 the IEEE Power & Energy Society gave Liu their Wanda Reder Pioneer in Power Award for innovative contributions and leadership in synchrophasor-based wide-area monitoring and control systems.
Liu received the B.S. degree from Xian Jiaotong University, China, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from The Ohio State University in 1986 and 1989, respectively, all in electrical engineering. She joined the Virginia Tech faculty in 1990 and was promoted to professor there in 2001. In 2009, she moved to the University of Tennessee as UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair Professor for Power Electronics.
Contact: Brenda Ellis, 615 343-6314
brenda.ellis@vanderbilt.edu