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Hobart
PhysElec Solutions Pty Ltd is a small Tasmanian company that provides independent
consultancy services and carries out contract work on a global basis within
the fields of electrical engineering and applied physics. The company’s
services cover six main categories of consulting and contract work, namely research,
product-related, project management, risk management, seminars & presentations
/ education & training, and site evaluations / surveys. The company’s
major field of specialisation across all of these service areas is in lightning
protection, earthing / grounding and surge / transient protection for buildings,
facilities, sites and their occupants across the complete range of industries.
The proposed project relates to the design of earthing (or “grounding”)
systems and the associated computer calculations, mainly the earthing system
resistance and/or impedance, and the step and touch voltages across the system.
The project provides students with the opportunity to produce a simple yet very
useful and powerful application to enable a power system or lightning protection
engineer to design an earthing system and quickly obtain results regarding the
expected values of resistance, impedance, step and touch voltage.
Several commercial packages exist in the marketplace and students will have
the opportunity to view at least two of these as a reference point. With regard
to the proposed development, however, the goal is to produce a software package
that is easy to learn and use, provides quick results and that is focused more
on the “transient” or high-frequency effects associated with the
safe dissipation of lightning strikes into the ground. None of the commercial
packages meet all of the above criteria.
The software development project will provide a unique blend of experience in
GUI development, implementation of numerical methods, code optimisation and
application of some of the latest cutting-edge research results in earthing
and grounding. Ideally, students (or some members of the team) will have a sound
knowledge of mathematical / physics / electrical engineering principles.
The major modules comprising the software development project include:
• A front-end / GUI with capabilities for quickly and easily drawing up
an earthing system design;
• Development of 2D & 3D graphics capabilities to display results;
• Review of current knowledge and research results on high frequency effects
of large currents in soil (guidance and literature will be provided);
• Evaluation of two existing commercial packages to determine strengths
and weaknesses;
• Development and implementation of numerical computation algorithms to
obtain step and touch potential profiles for any earthing system configuration;
• Implementation of calculation algorithms for resistance and impedance
in uniform and two-layer soils.
Students will be expertly supervised by a leading researcher in this field with
extensive experience in both a university and commercial / company environment.
The project suits a group of students with a strong technical background who
are interested in technical software development at the cutting-edge of international
research, whilst also requiring skills and experience in many other facets of
software development (such as graphics and user interfaces).
Both an IP and Confidentiality agreement required.
Client Name: Dr Franco D’Alessandro
Phone Number (BH): (03) 6228 7865
Mobile Number: 0437 853 339
Email Address: info@physelec.com
Website: www.physelec.com (active from March 2008)
Address: 37 Ogilvie Street, Mt Stuart, Tasmania. 7000
The estimated software difficulty rating is 4-4.5