By using simulations on a supercomputer at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) and a small transformer powered by UT Austin's one megawatt micro grid, researchers from UT Austin, the University of Maryland, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, WI, have developed a solution to address the overheating of grid transformers. The researchers created a high thermal conductivity paper using nanoparticles of boron nitride and tested it on the small transformer. "Our results indicate that if the thermal conductivity is increased by a few times using the engineered paper, the hotspot temperature inside a transformer can be reduced by between 5 to 10 °C," said Robert Hebner, one of the scientists involved in this study. "In most conditions, that should be enough to double or triple the life of the transformer."
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