US Army Research Laboratory Power-Line UAV Modeling and Simulation (ARL-PLUMS Ver 2.x) Software Tool: User Manual and Technical Report

Abstract : The US Army Research Laboratory Power-Line Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Modeling and Simulation (ARL-PLUMS) Software Tool allows a user to model, compute, and analyze the electric and magnetic fields around power lines. ARL-PLUMS comes with an interactive graphical user interface, which accesses a compute engine to calculate these fields around power lines due to various ground and line geometries and load conditions. ARL-PLUMS makes some simplifying assumptions about the ground and line geometries by using a 2-dimensional (2-D) power-line model. By doing so, less time is needed to solve a model. Even with these assumptions, however, the results are excellent for many applications, providing a 90% solution in only a couple minutes. The user can experiment with the model parameters to obtain a solid understanding of the underlying physics. Version 2.x enhances many features in earlier versions and adds entirely new ones. This user manual and technical report describes these new features and guides the user through using them.