Iowa State’s electrical and computer engineering department has been in the spotlight lately because of three grants that two professors have received.

Vijay Vittal, professor of electrical and computer engineering, received one of these grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Through this grant, Vittal said the electrical industry will be reconstructed.

“Research focuses on designing the operation of power systems more efficiently, developing the market environment for trading energy, and the other very important aspect is to enhance the reliability of the power system itself,” he said.

Vittal’s five-year grant of $237,500 from NSF will be used for a research site as a part of the Power System Engineering Research Center headquartered at Cornell University.

In addition to the NSF money given for the project, four electrical utilities are doing what is called “industry matching,” Vittal said.

Commonwealth Edison in Chicago, MidAmerican in Des Moines, Aliant in Madison, Wis., and Omaha Public Power District in Omaha, Neb., all are contributing $40,000 to the project each year for five years.

ISU is the seventh university to join this project, Vittal said.

The others are Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois, the University of California at Berkeley, Howard University and Washington State University.

Vittal said ISU traditionally has had a very strong power system program.

Through this project, he said there will be more competition and more open access in the industry.

Arun Somani, professor of electrical and computer engineering, received two of the three of the NSF-funded grants.

The first grant, $330,000 for three years, focuses on optical networking for fiber optics.

“The new architecture will make use of the fiber to provide the communication for multiple sources and communication at the same time,” Somani said.

The second, a three-year $350,000 grant, concentrates on adaptive balance computing (ABC).

“A lot of the current computers are sitting idle due to the fact that they need more computing and memory,” he said. “We are working on being able to rearrange the use of these resources.”

The basic idea of ABC is to be able to go from one ABC to the other to use all of the resources available to meet the needs presented.

Somani said he is very excited about both projects, and he said these grants are a sign of a competitive map for research.

Receiving money from NSF is very difficult and something that both ISU and the professors themselves need to be proud of, he said.