Howdy forum browsers.

No doubt for those that have spent a bit of time on these types of forums that you have come across this question before. I am about to enter my final year of a BEng (Electrical Power) degree, and it is project topic selection time. One of the difficulties I am having with this is the lack of exposure within the course to problems existing in either engineering practices or technology.
What I am looking for is suggestions from people who have worked in the power transmission, distribution and/or protection industry or worked with electrical machines to present any problems they have. I would also say that this is not just for me, but any student who is having the same problem and has come across this forum.

I would like to point out I am not looking for someone to do a project for me where I just write a thesis. I'm not even looking for someone to give me a project topic.
What I am hoping to get rolling is for professionals to highlight problems which an electrical power student could address and perhaps solve.

At this time there has been one issue which seems slightly promising although i know there is a product available that solves the problem. The DC power supplies used in the laboratories at my university are all analogue, and if someone is a perfectionist (eg if the experiment requires 12v in I want 12v in not 12.01v) a good 5 minutes of lab time can be wasted attempting to get the required voltage. So a digital DC supply from mains (Australian mains 240V at 50Hz) that also has very small error (generally I have between 0.5% to 1.5% total error for experiments done with current equipment, 2% error is allowed) would be a solution. This is possible although the main issue would be error reduction and this would come to PWM control and maintaining transistor switching frequencies.
As I said I have found digital power supplies commercially available (apparently they have been around since the '80s) although I think they are quite expensive and they are quite large (physical dimensions) which makes them less suitable for a lab situation where space may be at a premium (I know it is in our labs).

This is the sort of discussion I am hoping to encourage. Over the next week I intend to read as much of this type of forum as I can and if i find something I'll post it back here, and hopefully others can gain some benefit from this.

Looking forward to hearing from someone, and just reiterating I dont want a project babysitter!

Thanks,

Jarrod