Hoosier Innovation: Donnie Eslinger and Digital Fault Recorders

While the new Merom Plant was still in the commissioning phase in the early 1980s, Donnie Eslinger and Darrell Goodson often found themselves with downtime between tasks.

 

It’s dangerous to give smart guys free time, but this duo was interested in improving the company. With Eslinger inspired in part by his father’s career as a lineman, he and Goodson began discussing how to better locate faults.

 

At the time, locating faults was done using a light-beam recorder. Using a light film, similar to Kodak rolling paper, a light would shine down on the film showing sine waves and amplitude. Location was done by reading the film and measuring with a ruler. There was nothing digital about it.

 

Eslinger and Goodson didn’t see why it couldn’t be done digitally with a computer. Eslinger, who learned on IBM mainframes in college, had a do-it-yourself Z80 processor-based Sinclair computer that he brought in.

 

“Darrell’s ideas being a relay guy and my electronics knowledge, we put them together and came up with a method to locate faults,” Eslinger said.

 

They measured amps and volts, took the values and plugged it into their algorithms. What started as a side project became something more. They began to get engineering involved.

 

Engineering gave Eslinger and Goodson a room to work out of at Hoosier Energy’s former headquarters off 37 north of Bloomington.

 

They said, “You guys figure out this algorithm and develop it.”

 

So Eslinger and Goodson did.

 

“We would model lines digitally and record, then run the algorithm against it,” Eslinger said. “We would generate a fault and see if it would find the fault with the model. We spent four to six months developing that.”

 

Hoosier’s head of engineering at the time was Dan Souhrada, whose friend, Jim Fisher, owned a company that sold light-beam recorders. The two companies worked together throughout the process, but Souhrada had one final test – the digital fault recorder had to be able to get information to system control in less than a minute. No internet, just phone lines and a dial-up modem with an IBM personal computer. It was a success, just barely. Somewhere between 55 and 58 seconds, the fault information was relayed.

 

“It was pretty exciting,” Eslinger said. “Dan was a doubter at first, but he became a believer.”

 

Meanwhile, Fisher’s company eventually became USSI, now known as USI, a leading distributor of digital fault recorders.

 

As a result of that collaboration, Hoosier Energy received the first digital fault recorder the company made with serial number one. It was installed at Ramsey Primary.

 

“It was a great experience to take all this digital information and apply it,” Eslinger said. “It benefited system control to find faults quickly and get people where they need to go, but to also get information to engineering about whether relays were working properly.”

 

How far ahead of their time were Eslinger and Goodson?

 

In 1987, the pair attended an industry conference in Denver where the engineers were talking about a new way of doing things with a digital fault recorder. Old news at Hoosier Energy.

 

“They were talking about it, but we were already doing it,” Eslinger said.