ABSTRACT
Having power sources close to the end user establishes resilience in the event of power outages. In order to effectively mitigate any risk of losing power and productivity, major office buildings usually have some sort of backup generation to sustain a business. Homes generally do not have a robust back-up power system, so when a person is working from home and the power goes out, productivity stops. Therefore, a new power grid solution is needed. Coming from the metric prefix atto, meaning 10-18, an atto-grid provides power to a singular room or section of room which makes it even smaller than a picogrid. This atto-grid powers the typical load of a standard, single-person office: a printer, a laptop, a phone, and a lamp. The atto-grid project was proposed by Dr. Robert Kerestes from the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Pittsburgh as part of a senior design course, and required distributed generation, connection to the building electrical grid, and a monitoring system for volts, amps, and watts. With these requirements in mind, the senior design team was able to design the atto-grid with two types of distributed generation, an inverter, manual switches and contactors for isolation, and accessible outlet receptacles for users to supply power to their at-home office load. An economic cost-benefit analysis was conducted as well for the purpose of determining the atto-grid's availability to different income levels. For hardware, results of tests on power quality and uptime will be presented;for software, metrics covering response time and accuracy will be analyzed and discussed. Finally, the budget, timeline, and expectations from the department faculty and domain advisors are discussed. Throughout the design process and semester, the design team learned technical and practical lessons that were brought up due to the semester coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite technical and practical challenges, the team delivered on all requirements from the senior design curriculum, as well as the technical requirements based on the project proposal. The team acknowledges ways to improve the design if constraints were different, such as time, budget, and skillset. Finally, this paper will discuss feedback received from faculty and domain advisors throughout the semester, as well as reflect on progress and achievements for the atto-grid project. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021