Grainger CEME

Students and visitors in the ECEB lobby have learned about energy efficiency through the Student Sustainability Committee-funded touch-screen energy display since Engineering Open House 2021. Two kiosks present ways to reduce energy use and encourage visitors to commit to one or more of these. In return, their names are entered into a random drawing to receive a solar phone charger. Names are selected for Earth Day in April and Energy Efficiency Day in October.

On the wall behind the kiosks a large touch screen displays a dashboard showing ECEB’s energy use and production in real time, energy efficiencies incorporated into the building design, and drone pictures of the ECEB solar array. A poster above the screen celebrates ECEB achieving net-zero energy.

I had a Q&A with Autumn and her writing talents shine in her responses to the following questions about interaction with and growing awareness of concepts of sustainability:

Q: How were you first exposed to concepts of sustainability?

A: I was first exposed to sustainability in grammar school, starting in third grade. Every year after that, a group from ComEd would visit our classrooms to teach us about energy efficiency. They always brought Super Saver energy kits and walked us through short questionnaires asking things like: how long were our showers, did we leave the water running while brushing our teeth, how often did we travel and by what means. Based on our answers, we’d get an estimate of our yearly carbon footprint. The kits included tools to help us reduce our impact—like 5-minute shower timers, energy-efficient shower heads and faucet covers, and LED lightbulbs. It made me think about how even small habits could make a big difference.

Q: What are some sustainability practices you have implemented into your daily activities?

A: I always make sure to turn the water off while brushing my teeth—something that stuck with me from early lessons in conservation. On campus, I walk to class as much as possible, only taking the bus when the weather’s too cold and rarely using Uber. I bring reusable bags when grocery shopping, turn off lights when they’re not needed, and usually opt to open the blinds for natural light instead of relying on electricity. These small habits have become part of my routine and help me stay mindful of my impact.

Q: Has sustainability influenced your decision making?  If so, how?

A: Yes, it definitely has—because I genuinely worry about our planet and what our future living environment will look like, not just for us, but for the animals we share it with. Sustainability has helped me resist the temptation of overconsumption. When shopping, especially for food, I focus more on fresh produce and only buying what I actually need. I’ve also become more comfortable with shopping secondhand rather than always opting for something new. Even small actions—like walking a bit further to find a recycling bin—feel natural to me now, because it’s been instilled in me to care about how my choices affect the world around me.

Q: What is a rooted belief you hold about sustainability?

A: I believe that sustainability is a shared responsibility—something we all have to take part in, even through the smallest actions. I also believe it’s about care. Care for the planet, care for people, and care for the future. Sustainability isn’t just about preserving resources; it’s about creating a world where both humans and animals can thrive. It starts with awareness, but it’s rooted in empathy and intention.

Photo courtesy of Jeremy Sykes, Power & Energy Office Manager

The IEEE hosted its 16th annual Power and Energy Conference at Illinois (PECI) on April 11 in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Building, Coordinated Science Laboratory and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at The Grainger College of Engineering. We welcomed speakers from UT Austin, MIT, UC-Berkeley and Wisconsin and attendees from across campus and the nation.

The event featured two keynote speakers, two paper talks, 20 posters, a tech talk and panel discussion. Highlights included “Imagining Energy Conversion Systems as Circuits,” by alumnus Professor Brian Johnson of UT-Austin and an “Entrepreneurial Experiences in Renewable Energy Startups” tech talk from former ECE Professor Patrick Chapman. The panel discussion focused on “Emerging Challenges in Data Center Power Delivery”. Thank you to everyone who attended!

More about PECI: https://lnkd.in/dYe6b2W

The US Air Force has an increasing need for better (smaller, more efficient, more powerful) pulsed power converters. These systems deliver high power for very short duration to enable directed energy capabilities such as laser excitation, high energy radar, high-power microwave radiation, electronics disruption, and electromagnetic launch. Commercial applications of pulsed power include particle accelerators, X-ray imaging, air filtering, plasma generation, and sterilization of potable liquids. In addition to short, high-power pulses of energy, these applications require repetitive operation, often at thousands or even over hundred-thousands of pulses each second. These high-power and high-frequency requirements pose a significant challenge to system miniaturization and design.

Conventional pulsed power systems have moved to solid-state conversion with power semiconductor switching devices to improve converter lifetime and increase pulsed repetition rates. Converters use controlled switching devices to charge energy storage capacitors at low voltage and discharge at high voltages, producing high-energy pulses. The power output of these systems is primarily limited by the energy stored in the capacitors, and the power losses in the switching devices which leads to overheating. Capacitors, charging inductors, and thermal management often dominate the system volume. In this project, we propose to use recent advancements in methods and design for switched-capacitor converters to reduce pulsed power losses and thus increase conversion efficiency, repetition rates, and overall power density. We will leverage advances in high performance wide bandgap GaN power transistors with integrated gate drives to reduce complexity and increase reliability while achieving high efficiency power conversion in an ultra-compact footprint. The final demonstration will leverage our expertise in hybrid switched-capacitor and multilevel designs with advanced control methods to produce a compact, efficient, and scalable power converter to meet Air Force and Department of Defense needs.

With support from the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) Arijit Banerjee has been leading an effort to design and create affordable, hands-on experimentation kits for college-level power electronics courses. The beta-version kits are already a hit with his U. of I. students, but Banerjee and his collaborators have ambitious plans that go far beyond the campus level: the kits are intended to be replicated and shared with resource-constrained educational institutions around the globe.

“These kits are designed to enhance students’ understanding by allowing them to directly apply theoretical concepts in a lab setting,” Banerjee said. “By engaging in guided experiments, students gain practical skills and experience that help bridge the gap between theory and application.” 

The Illinois design was cheaper because the kits had been developed to be affordable, single-use consumables. Students work with them throughout the ECE 469 course, “Power Electronics Laboratory”: they start with a fresh board and build on it through various projects, and get to keep the completed piece at the end of the semester.  The low price, without any compromise in the learning quality, was a key factor for the IEEE PELS; their goal is to provide high-quality experimentation tools to students at under-resourced universities that may not have state-of-the-art facilities, or may have no lab facilities at all.

Banerjee also singled out Dr. Ulaş C. Coşkun, research engineer for his significant contributions to the effort. 

Excerpted from article by Eleanor Wyllie

A view of a new EV charging box installed in Lot B4.

This study explores familiar, basic 120V AC outlets as a charging infrastructure alternative.  Sometimes, called Level 1 charging, it takes many hours to recharge an EV battery from this basic infrastructure.  On the other hand, commuters park their cars all day, so this duration is not necessarily a problem.  The costs match the retail cost of electrical energy, since the infrastructure does not impose any special requirements.

In the first phase, the iSEE project team has designed data collection hardware to obtain charging data for basic infrastructure charging, with emphasis on commuters holding parking permits and parking all day.  The team is working with Campus Parking and Facilities & Services to support the deployment of this data collection capability in Lot B4, the North Campus Parking Structure, to gather initial data in phase one.

Phase two of the project will involve about 30 data collection boxes dispersed around campus.  This phase will trial management and pricing plans that will help make future programs convenient for users and financially sustainable.

Article excerpted from iSEE Newsletter.

For almost a decade, the Center for Power Optimization for Electro-Thermal Systems (POETS) has pursued innovations in electric powertrains for transportation systems ranging from cars and trains to ships and small aircraft.  Now, a $2.7 million award from the Federal Aviation Administration’s Fueling Aviation’s Sustainable Transition (FAST) program will upgrade the POETS testbed to enable testing of larger aircraft power and propulsion systems than it can currently handle.

The POETS testbed’s expansion — which is the only infrastructure project that received a FAST low-emission aviation technologies grant — will increase its capabilities in three respects.

First, a 1-megawatt motor drive test stand will be constructed to enable full-scale demonstrations of aircraft propulsion systems. That’s a fivefold expansion f the current testbed’s 200-kilowatt capacity.

Second, a furnace and a cryogenic system will be added to study how components respond to extreme heat and cold. The furnace will offer temperatures of up to 600°C so that high-temperature-resistant components and thermal insulation can be studied in realistic operating conditions. The cryogenic system will allow researchers to study possible innovations for future aerospace systems.

The third upgrade will be a suite of tools for assessing reliability of insulation, ability of components and subsystems to endure vibrations and shocks, and tolerance of electromagnetic interference (EMI).

A portion of the current POETS testbed.

Grainger CEME, Rolls-Royce, RTX, Boeing, and the Air Force Research Lab will partner with POETS on the testbed effort.  Sherry Yu, a U. of I. alumna who returned to campus to serve as the testbed manager for POETS, will lead the implementation of the testbed upgrades.

Excerpted from an article written by Jenny Applequist.

Students and visitors in the ECEB lobby have learned about energy efficiency through the Student Sustainability Committee-funded touch-screen energy display since Engineering Open House 2021. Two kiosks present ways to reduce energy use and encourage visitors to commit to one or more of these. In return, their names are entered into a random drawing to receive a solar phone charger. Names are selected for Earth Day in April and Energy Efficiency Day in October.

On the wall behind the kiosks a large touch screen displays a dashboard showing ECEB’s energy use and production in real time, energy efficiencies incorporated into the building design, and drone pictures of the ECEB solar array. A poster above the screen celebrates ECEB achieving net-zero energy.

Jim Liao, the 2023 Energy Efficiency Day winner, reported he has taken classes in ECEB, including ECE 484 Principles of Safe Autonomy and ECE 470 Introduction to Robotics in ECEB. He said, “As a newcomer ECE graduate student, I just toured the ECEB building and found the kiosks and the TV screen describing how the building saves energy, then I took a look at the description and filled out the questionnaire.” He added that he was “stunned to learn all the details and actions on the design and functions of ECEB after finding the kiosks and the TV screen describing how the building saves energy.” He also discovered the motion sensors when working in the labs: “I … found out that if I stayed and did not move my whole body in front of the computer too long, the light and the air conditioner would switch off. To continue working, I would have to wave my hands to make the system detect that there are some people in the area.”
Jim said he was surprised to see that ECEB has “solar panels on the third floor facing south to capture the sunlight and generate power for the building. In addition, the louvered metal canopy outside of the building could block the hot sunlight in the summer but allow the sunlight in the winter. I am quite impressed with the design of the building, and hope there will be more green buildings over the world in the future.” He also liked watching the ECEB aerial video. “It is really spectacular that there are many solar panels covering the roof of the building. Additionally, we can also see the large screen displaying the energy that the solar panels generate on the dashboard. I am really impressed with the ECEB working for saving energy. Really Interesting!”

Jim reported he saves energy by switching off the light when he leaves an area, mostly at home, and takes public transportation or walks for commuting. In his home country, Taiwan, he works at gardening, planting trees and flowers in an open area and in his personal garden.

Photo courtesy of Todd Sweet, ECE Director of Constituent Engagement

Electric planes that could fly cleaner and transport hundreds of people thousands of miles depend on more powerful batteries and motors than those used in today’s electric cars. Although shorter-range electric planes and electric air taxies, including electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (EVTOL) that carry a few people short distances nearby (from downtown to the airport) could be commercially available by next year (2025), the dream goal is to electrify large planes that take off and land like regular jet-fueled airplanes. Professor Kiruba Haran said, “To fly an airplane you need two big things: power to propel them forward and energy to keep them flying for a long duration.”
Energy is centered on batteries and fuel cells. Batteries for EVOLS and electric planes require higher density than those used in electric cars, because it takes so much energy to get them off the ground. This involves addressing battery weight and heat tolerance. To that end, Halle Cheeseman, a program director for the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced that 12 teams will receive a total of $15 million to try to develop batteries and energy storage systems with about four times as much energy density as current technologies, with the goal of electrifying a plane that could convey up to 100 people for 1,000 miles. Illinois-based battery materials startup Natrion, co-founded by CEO Alex Kosyakov, along with NASA, and others are developing solid-state faster-charging batteries that can tolerate much higher temperatures.
Propulsion is the focus of Professor Haran and others, including Toshiba and Airbus. They are building superconducting motors that can generate megawatts of power using superconducting materials, which have “no resistance, minimal heat loss and can carry more current, meaning less material — and less weight.” Kiruba remarked, “Superconducting materials hold the promise of being ‘very efficient, very lightweight, power dense.’” However, they must be cooled to exceedingly low temperatures. A possible solution is to use “the energy generated from vaporizing liquid hydrogen into fuel to cool the superconductor.” Another is hybrid turboelectric planes with gas turbines to drive electric motors.
Kiruba noted, “For the last 50 years, people have been making electric machines ‘incrementally better.’ Now they have a ‘clean sheet’ for designing ‘a really efficient propulsion system … We’re trying to reinvent the electric machine.’”

This article is extracted from a Grainger College of Engineering Electical & Computer Engineering News item written by Alison Snyder and Joann Muller from “Axios” in the February 24, 2024 issue of Science https://www.axios.com/science

Professor Arijit Banerjee’s group has been researching a wind-energy harvest architecture suitable for offshore wind turbines, which has been funded by the Department of Energy since 2018. They used a 400 W benchtop setup to prove the concept and demonstrated it at a 125 kW power level at the POETS Research and Development Center (see below and youtube link to check out the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I6LOAICPvY&t=1s).
Scaling up the power by more than 300x brought many practical challenges and surprises, including a moment when the generator was on fire and an episode similar to an “aircrash investigation.” ProfessorBanerjee shared the group’s journey and discussed the architecture, along with results from the high-power testbed.
This item is based on Arijit’s notes as well as an abstract he submitted for the lecture on November 2, 2023.

Dr. Ulaş C. Coşkun began work in September as CEME’s new research engineer. Dr. Coskun oversees the CEME facilities and the power and energy systems areas on the 4th floor of ECEB and ensures the equipment is in optimal condition for faculty and student use. He primarily supports faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students in experimental research by training them in instrumentation and equipment.
Dr. Coskun graduated from Illinois with a Ph.D. in Physics in 2005. He then held postdocs at the University of California, the University of Texas, and Duke University, before joining ISS, a microcopy company, as a research engineer. At ISS, he focused on developing microscopy setups for research groups all over the globe. During his tenure, he developed hardware, software, and electronics to enable commercially available confocal microscopes to do FLIM, PLIM, FCS, and nSPIRO experiments.
Dr. Coşkun published two Science and various PRL articles during his academic career in condensed matter, specifically focusing on proximity-induced superconductivity in graphene and carbon nanotubes and how the magnetic field affects the electrical properties of such systems. At ISS, he designed a variable pinhole, the fifth in the world design, which improves user experiences on ISS confocal systems, and an electronic circuit which lets MaiTai lasers be usable in PLIM experiments. His software is still actively used in the physics department, where he earned his degree.
With over a decade of experience in experimental research and a strong background in physics, Dr. Coşkun brings a wealth of knowledge to his role as the CEME research engineer.