Team members from the National Electric Energy Testing Research and Applications Center received three Best Conference Paper Awards from the 2008 IEEE Insulated Conductors Committee Meeting. The award winners were announced at the May 2009 meeting of the committee.

Two projects are supported by the NEETRAC Cable Diagnostic Focused Initiative, and a third presentation is supported by the NEETRAC Baseline Program.

"Withstand Measurements: More Than Meets the Eye" was written by Josh Perkel with Nigel Hampton, Jean Carlos Hernandez, Miroslav Begovic, John Hans, Ron Riley, Pete Tyschenko, Frank Doherty, George Murray, and Leeman Hong. This paper was the result of collaborative work with a number of NEETRAC member utilities. The industry has tended to view
withstand tests as simply pass/fail with little ability to predict future performance. This work has shown that there is much more information in these tests when the results are coupled with typical utility system data.

"Measurement of Cable System Loss Using Time Domain and VLF Techniques" was written by Jean Francois Drapeau with Jean Carlos Hernandez. Mr. Drapeau is a researcher with Hydro Quebec who spent two research sabbaticals at NEETRAC. During this period, Messrs. Drapeau and Hernandez conducted the first study to compare the performance of two different diagnostic techniques. Prior to this work, it had been assumed that these techniques did not give the same findings; this work showed that they are in fact very comparable.

A third presentation supported by the NEETRAC Baseline Program also won a Best Conference Paper Award. The paper entitled "Superhydrophobicity in Power Applications" was written by Nigel Hampton and Frank Lambert; it described the practical applications of coating to extend the life of insulating components.