Salt River Project has announced that it has provided more than $2.6 million in funding for three dozen projects at Arizona’s public universities dedicated to improving its power and water systems.
The nonprofit utility’s investment for this school year covers 24 projects with Arizona State University, seven with Northern Arizona University and five with the University of Arizona. The projects involve work on electric vehicle charging, energy demand prediction and response, forest thinning and wildfire detection.
"SRP is proud to invest in projects with our state universities to not only encourage innovation but also find ways to improve our day-to-day operations," said Chico Hunter, SRP’s Manager of Innovation and Development, in a statement. "The advantage of working with university students on real-world issues and solutions is these talented individuals could be a part of our future workforce."
SRP in particular highlighted a few of the projects at each university. At ASU, two projects involve hydropower assets in the SRP watershed and will be conducted by student teams working under Assistant Professor Thomas Czerniawski.
In the first, student researchers will use lidar technology and high-definition images to assess the condition of hydropower turbines at Horse Mesa and Mormon Flat dams — some of which have been in use since the 1970s. The project will aim to determine when maintenance and replacement will be needed.
In the second, a separate team will use Digital Twin technology — which blends physical models and data analytics — as a way to simulate SRP’s hydropower assets and provide information that can help maintain and extend the life span of those assets, as well as improve safety.
Working with UArizona, the utility is looking at how and where it will be able to use concrete that is made using recycled plastic coating from about 3 million pounds of old electrical cables that SRP processes each year.
And one of the NAU projects involves a pair of mechanical engineering master’s students who are using drones to collect infrared images that show heat signatures from abnormal surface soil moisture and can be used to pinpoint cracks and leaks in underground pipes that carry water from canals to municipal water treatment plants and other customers. The project is in its second phase.
