ABB Inc. is a global corporation, with more than 160,000 employees in more than 100 countries, operating in the fields of power transmission and distribution, automation, finance, and petrochemicals. Based locally out of Greensburg, Pennsylvania,  ABB High Voltage Technology (HVT) is responsible for manufacturing high-voltage transmission and protection equipment for the use in power grids across the world. Current Interrupter Greensburg's facility primarily focuses on the research, design, manufacturing, and servicing of power circuit breakers rated from 34.5 kilovolts (kV) to 800 kV. Currently, the circuit breakers drive a piston-cylinder circuit-interrupting element to eliminate high amperage faults on transmission systems.  

The individuals at ABB, Inc., as well as their competition, are striving to develop cost effective high voltage circuit-interrupting elements that are more reliable, durable, and safer, while increasing the maximum power capacity and decreasing the manufacturing costs. These circuit-breaking systems that store, release, and this energy to the circuit-interrupting elements. This project has been developed with two goals in mind. First, to find three materials that can effectively store and release energy, and secondly, find a method to store and release this energy to the circuit-interrupting elements for our optimal materials.

Over the span of a four month period, the final deliverables will be compiled and completed by April 22, 2002.   The deliverables from the PSU-ABB Team will include the properties of the best materials for storing energy, results from the analytical and physical testing of these materials, and model representing the material best-suited for the design constraints, and a computer-based simulation to test the proposed circuit-interrupting system built from the chosen material.

The preliminary research yielded many ideas for energy storing techniques. Through a Mechanism Selection Table, a model selected was the multi-solenoid model. This model will improve customer satisfaction and provide ABB, Inc. with an new, innovative idea.