Posted on by Kevin Casey Toomey Diagram of the winning electric aircraft design by ECE student team
When it comes to electrified transportation, the sky’s the limit for three electrical and computer engineering students at The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Anubhav Bose, Mudith Witharamalage and Omkar Kulkarni have won first place in a prestigious international design competition for electric aircraft: the 2025 ITEC+EATS Student Design Challenge. The ECE student team created an innovative design for a fully electric regional aircraft’s power distribution system.
The competition, sponsored by Elysian Aircraft and hosted by the IEEE/AIAA Transportation Electrification Conference and Electric Aircraft Technologies Symposium, challenged students to design the electrical backbone for a 90-passenger electric airplane.
The task was no small feat. The students had to create a high-voltage power distribution system that could transmit electricity from batteries to eight propellers while also incorporating a backup fuel-powered generator. Their design needed to meet strict aviation safety standards while considering everything from thermal regulation to different voltage requirements throughout the aircraft.
Left to right: Herb Schlickenmaier (President at HS Advanced Concepts LLC and conference co-chair), Francesco Salucci (a judge for the competition and an aerospace engineer at Argonne National Labs), Mudith Witharamalage and Omkar Kulkarni
“We had to read a lot of literature in a variety of disciplines to piece together an accurate, safe, and feasible design,” Omkar explains. The biggest challenge was choosing the optimal network voltage – high enough to efficiently power the aircraft while keeping cable weight to a minimum.
Each team member brought unique expertise to the project. Mudith brought together the team, taking on the role of planner and team leader. He also handled preliminary analysis, motor calculations, and thermal management. Omkar focused on the power electronics design, from batteries to motors. He tackled voltage sensitivity, battery selection and component placement. And as the most senior member, Anubhav brought his prior experience in electric aircraft design from his projects and internships. He acted as a mentor and focused on the high-voltage safety considerations and thermal management.
The winning design features several groundbreaking elements. The team chose a lithium-air split battery system with an energy density of 500 watt-hours per kilogram – technology they predict will be available by 2035. They also chose an operating voltage of ±3000 volts DC, significantly higher than typical aircraft designs but necessary for efficient power transmission.
Their design included careful consideration of cable materials, selecting lightweight aluminum conductors and polypropylene insulation with aluminum oxide filler for durability and a relatively environmentally friendly manufacturing process.
The team already sees opportunities for further innovation. Omkar comments: “There is so much more we could have explored further. We were consciously making tradeoffs between practicality and novel innovations.” For example, superconducting machines are a potential game-changer for future electric aircraft, but the cryogenic cooling requirements make the technology challenging to implement today. As it stands, this award-winning design offers a glimpse of what might soon be possible for electric aviation.
Glenn Zorpette is editorial director for content development at IEEE Spectrum.
Hinetics demonstrated its superconducting motor in April 2025.
Of the countless technologies invented over the past half century, high-temperature superconductors are among the most promising and yet also the most frustrating. Decades of research has yielded an assortment of materials that superconduct at temperatures as high as -140 °C (133 kelvins) at ambient pressure. And yet commercial applications have been elusive.
Now, though, a couple of developments could finally push high-temperature superconductors into commercial use. One is the availability, at relatively moderate cost, of copper-oxide-based superconducting tape, which is being produced by a few companies for startups working on tokamak fusion reactors. The reactors use the superconducting tape, which is typically made of yttrium barium copper oxide, in powerful electromagnets. The other development involves a different group of startups that are using the tape to build electric motors with very high power-to-weight ratios, mainly for use in electric aircraft.
Among that latter group of startups is Hinetics, formed in 2017 to commercialize research led by Kiruba Haran at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. This past April, the company tested a prototype motor outfitted with superconducting rotor magnets. According to Haran, the tests, which included spinning a propeller in a laboratory setup, validated key components of the company’s designs for superconducting motors that will operate at power levels of 5 and 10 megawatts. Such levels would be high enough to power a regional passenger airliner with multiple motors. The work was funded in part by a grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E).
“HTS [high temperature superconductors] are having a moment, because the costs are coming down rapidly, driven by all the work on fusion,” Haran says. “A lot of people are ramping up production, and new startups, and new capabilities, are coming into the market.”
Hinetics is one of perhaps a dozen companies, large and small, trying to use high-temperature superconductors to build extremely efficient motors with very high power density. These include aerospace giant Airbus, which is working on a superconducting airliner under a program called ZEROe, as well as Toshiba, Raytheon, and U.K. startup HyFlux. However, Hinetics is taking an unusual approach.
Common approaches to building a superconducting machine use the superconducting material for either the rotor or stator coils, or both. Typically, the coils are cooled with a liquid or gas kept at a sufficiently low temperature by an external cryocooling system. The fluid cools the superconducting coils by convection, by physically flowing through heat exchangers in contact with the coils and carrying away heat as it does so. The system has been used successfully in some experimental motors and generators, but it suffers from several fundamental problems. A big one is the need to circulate the cooling fluid through the rotor coils, which are embedded in a rotor assembly that is spinning at perhaps thousands of revolutions per minute. Another problem is that this approach requires a complicated cryocooling system that includes pumps, seals, gaskets, pipes, insulation, a rotary coupling that transfers the cryogen into and out of the rotor, and other components that can fail and that add considerable weight.
The rotor coils in an experimental Hinetics electric motor are made of a high-temperature superconductor. They are cooled by a cryocooler that runs axially down the center of the motor. The rotor assembly and the cryocooler are enclosed within a vacuum vessel.Hinetics
Hinetics’s Revolutionary Idea: Spin the Cryocooler
Hinetics’s system, on the other hand, uses a self-contained cryocooler that is small enough to be attached to the rotor, and which spins along with it, eliminating the need to pass fluids into and out of a spinning vessel. With this arrangement, “you don’t have to immerse the superconductor into the fluid,” notes Laurent Pilon, an associate director for technology at ARPA-E. Instead, “there’s a cryocooler, and a cold connection, and you pull out the heat from the superconducting magnetic coils to the cryocooler, performing a refrigeration cycle. The beauty here is that it simplifies everything because now you just have the cryocooler that spins with the shaft.”
In this configuration, the rotor assembly, including the coils, is cooled by conduction rather than convection. The rotor is installed within a vacuum chamber. Heat from the superconducting magnet assembly is transferred through a “thermal bus,” which is basically just a disk-shaped copper structure that conducts the heat to the cryocooler, which is attached to the other side of the copper disk.
One of the challenges, Haran says, was finding a cryocooler small and light enough to spin at high rates and keep functioning while doing so. For its proof-of-concept unit, the Hinetics team used an off-the-shelf Stirling-cycle cooler from Sunpower. It can remove only 10 watts of heat from the rotor assembly but, in this configuration, that’s all that’s needed to keep the rotor coils superconducting, Haran says.
One potential drawback of the system is that, because of this relatively low heat-removal capacity, the cryocooler takes a few hours to cool the superconducting magnet sufficiently to start operating. Future versions will reduce the period needed, according to Haran. And on the bright side, the low heat-removal rate means high efficiency, because the cooler has just enough power to maintain the low temperatures needed during operation, and not much excess capacity.
To provide electric power to the spinning cryostat and rotor magnets the prototype used a slip ring. But future versions of the motor will use a wireless system, possibly based on inductive coupling, Haran says.
Tests of Hinetics’s superconducting motor this past April validated the basic design and cleared the way for construction of more powerful units.Hinetics
Applications on Ships Are Also Possible
He opted not to make the stators superconducting, because in a typical configuration the stator is energized by an alternating-current (AC) waveform. Superconductors are only completely lossless for direct current. So the application of AC to superconducting coils in the stator would result in power losses that would require another cooling system to remove heat from the stator.
Haran figures it’s not necessary. With superconductors just in the rotor coils, the motor will achieve efficiencies in the range of 98 to 99.5 percent, which is about four or five percentage points higher than what is realistically possible with a permanent-magnet synchronous motor. Haran also insists that the superconducting design would attain this high efficiency without any reduction in power density, a combination that’s hard to achieve in a conventional motor.
Four or five percentage points might not seem like a lot, but it would matter in typical aviation applications, Pilon says, especially when coupled with higher power density. On its website, Hinetics claims that its motor has a continuous specific power of 10 kilowatts per kilogram, which would put the machine among the most power-dense units available, on a continuous-power basis. According to Haran, the next generation of the superconducting motor will achieve 40 kW/kg, which would be far higher than anything commercially available.
Although aviation is the initial target, Haran sees potential applications in ship propulsion, where the motor’s high volumetric power density would be a draw. “What’s really exciting is that we are seeing a transformational new technology become practical,” he says. “Once you get to megawatts and low speed, anywhere you need high torque, this could be very interesting.”
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
