MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Va. (WRIC) — A team of experts at Virginia Tech is looking at ways to move power lines underground to reduce power outages during storms.
Joe VanTassel — Assistant Professor Charles E. Via Jr. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering — and his team was recently selected to receive a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to test more efficient ways to safely and cost-effectively bury power lines underground. Ta.
Many city and town leaders have already mandated burying power lines. However, according to a Virginia Tech spokesperson, “burying these wires often requires the use of underground directional boring machines that drill into the soil to depths of 3 feet or more.”
This process, called “undergrounding,” prevents storms from destroying utility poles and wires and causing power outages. But experts say boring operations can sometimes cause machine operators to collide with power, water and sewage pipes, potentially delaying projects and increasing costs.
“The team's plan is to install sensors on the drill heads of subsurface directional boring machines and at the ground surface to capture data and combine it with artificial intelligence predictive modeling to give operators a three-dimensional view of what they can see. The drill head is looking at that,” a university spokesperson said.
Vantassel likened the process to taking an X-ray or MRI of a person.
For more information about the project, please visit: Virginia Tech website.
