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.<\/p>\n
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It\u2019s dangerous to give smart guys free time, but this duo was interested in improving the company. With Eslinger inspired in part by his father\u2019s career as a lineman, he and Goodson began discussing how to better locate faults.<\/p>\n
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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.<\/p>\n
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Eslinger and Goodson didn\u2019t see why it couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u201cDarrell\u2019s ideas being a relay guy and my electronics knowledge, we put them together and came up with a method to locate faults,\u201d Eslinger said.<\/p>\n
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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.<\/p>\n
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Engineering gave Eslinger and Goodson a room to work out of at Hoosier Energy\u2019s former headquarters off 37 north of Bloomington.<\/p>\n
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They said, \u201cYou guys figure out this algorithm and develop it.\u201d<\/p>\n
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So Eslinger and Goodson did.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe would model lines digitally and record, then run the algorithm against it,\u201d Eslinger said. \u201cWe would generate a fault and see if it would find the fault with the model. We spent four to six months developing that.\u201d<\/p>\n
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