Chanyeop Park, assistant professor, electrical engineering, has brought to UWM a $1 million research project from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a clean alternative to the world’s most potent greenhouse gas—SF6.
As the nation looks to strengthen and upgrade its grid, it will be critical to phase out equipment that uses SF6, or sulfur hexafluoride. The man-made gas—an excellent insulator used primarily by electric utilities to manage electricity’s flow in high-voltage circuit breakers—is extremely bad for the environment, Park says. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, it is 22,800 times worse for the climate than carbon dioxide. It enters the atmosphere through equipment leaks and remains for 3,200 years.
Park is working with Georgia Tech researchers, who lead the nearly $4 million project from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to develop and test a prototype of a three-phase SF6-free AC high-voltage circuit breaker.
The team will test the prototypes throughout the project. In late summer or fall, Park will initially test a reduced-scale prototype at UWM; in the final year of the project, a full-scale prototype will be tested at KEMA Labs, in Chalfont, PA.
The project includes a plan to transfer the technology to market.