Sherry Yu and Samith Sirimanna in front of chiller

In January, Professor Haran’s group visited Johnson Controls (JCI) where they met with engineering leads on their jointproject,“Development of High Efficiency Compressor Motor Design Project – Phase I Summary and Phase II Launching.”

JCI is to provide specifications on the number of speed cycles, fatigue life, windage loss-model validation, and cooling results: scaling down the thermals from sample shown for the prototype, along with best estimates in rotor average/max temperature, copper average/max temperature, and shaft size: possible reduction on shaft diameter in rotor to get more space for rotor slots.

Kiruba’s group is to work on scalability of the designs, and return with a detailed plan that takes into account the impact of the air gap and switching frequency.

Left to right: Students Samith Sirimanna, Sherry Yu, Byung Hoon (BH) Min and post-doc Dongsu Lee with JCI personnel

The compressor they are designing for is a part in the chiller (above). The chiller in active use  supplies chilled water (6–12 °C) to the building.

Professor Kiruba Haran, IEEE Fellow, Steering Committee Member of the IEEE Transportation Electrification Community, and former chair of the Electric Machinery Committee of IEEE-PES, talked with Dr. Marty Bradley, chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Aircraft Electrified Propulsion and Power Working Group and Technical Fellow for The Boeing Company. Marty works in the Boeing Commercial Airplanes Advanced-Concepts Group in Long Beach, California, where he has led projects on aviation environmental life-cycle analysis and propulsion. He was the Principal Investigator for the NASA-funded SUGAR study looking at advanced technologies for future commercial aircraft, including the hybrid electric SUGAR Volt.
Kiruba listed key players in electrified propulsion: NASA, specifically its American Aerospace Technical Academy program, and more broadly, its aeronautics piece, and all the major aviation engine companies publicly involved with related projects. More than 100 electrified aircraft concepts currently are being pursued, with 60 percent of those from non-traditional aerospace companies. Boeing and traditional air-framers also have projects underway.
The AIAA and IEEE are collaborating on electrified aviation propulsion initiatives through the Transportation Electrification Committee by developing cooperative workshops to provide a common interface into the five or six IEEE societies that have elements connected to electrification as it relates to the aviation industry. In July 2016, Kiruba spoke at an AIAA workshop calling for greater collaboration with IEEE. This led to the joint IEEE Electric Aircraft Technologies Symposium in the summer of 2018 that helped solidify ongoing cooperation between the AIAA and IEEE.
Kiruba stated that for “more electric aircraft” (with electrical auxiliary systems) to become “all electric aircraft” (electrical propulsion with a unified system of components, controls, thermal management, protection and redundancy handled at the vehicle level, and, potentially, multiple power generation units that are networked and maybe feed more than one propulsion unit), component people must talk to the airplane folks. Marty noted that AIAA has focused on aerospace, aeronautics, and aerodynamics performance. But airplane designers have lacked skills in modeling electrical components and understanding how to include electrified components. Bringing IEEE and AIAA together will expedite their common goal.
Article excerpted from https://tec.ieee.org/articles-publications/ieee-talks-transportation-electrification/ieee-talks-transportation-electrification-aviation-propulsion

Professor Arirjit Banerjee presented “Electromechanical Energy Conversion = Magic” this past December to the Campus Middle School for Girls physics class taught by Laura Shoener. He first talked about energy production—35% goes to consumption and the rest to generation, and then explained the concept of horsepower (including a picture of a horse). He and the girls shared common examples of energy consumption and the unexpected: a party-light rotating ball and catapult used to launch planes from an aircraft carrier. Arijit described how motion produces electricity and electricity produces motion. The magic comes with magnets. He demonstrated linear motion with iron shavings moved by a magnet on a plastic sheet. And when copper is pulled through the opening in the red magnet on the table, it creates an electric field through the copper. The girls could feel the force but only when the copper was moving. He cited Farady’s law on changing electric fields and Olm’s law on voltage through a conductor and explained how we need rotation to produce power.
Arijit created sine waves exhibited on an oscilloscope he hooked up to a magnet controlled with an electromagnet. The class then went upstairs to the Grainger Electric Machinery Laboratory and experimented with the magnetic ring cannon.

“How many have seen magic?”
It seemed an unusual question, especially from someone whose daily life revolves around the very real world of engineering, but to Arijit Banerjee, “Engineering is magic.”
“Every day when I come to work, it’s like Disneyland.”
The electrical and computer engineering (ECE) assistant professor spoke to 25 of the 300 Illinois teens visiting the University of Illinois campus as part of 4-H Illini Summer Academies.
Illinois 4-H provides the five-day college experience to help high school teens build relationships with U of I staff as the teens explore college majors and potential careers. In addition to coursework, the participants stay in dorms, explore campus, and experience many outside activities common to a college student’s life.
Professor Lynford Goddard coordinates the ECE activities in order to show youth the breadth of the department, from basic circuits and optical elements to control theory and power grids. “Our sincere hope is that you come here and replace us,” said Subhonmesh Bose, ECE assistant professor. “All the knowledge we have today will be obsolete when you are our age.”
Cooperating campus departments have 17 hours with the teens throughout the week. The departments can also recruit students one-on-one. Many who got their first introduction to the university during this conference later enrolled as college students.
Excerpted from: https://4h.extension.illinois.edu/our-stories/news/knowledge-magic

A new invention developed by an ECE ILLINOIS team is creating new possibilities for using offshore wind as a competitive source of energy. The team’s award-winning system is set to make this critical renewable energy resource more attainable and cost efficient, producing significant environmental benefits.
ECE ILLINOIS Assistant Professor Arijit Banerjee and PhD student Phuc Thanh Huynh received a prestigious outstanding presentation award for their offshore wind-energy system at the Applied Power Electronics Conference (APEC) 2019. APEC is the leading conference in the power electronics field attended by leaders from the industry and academia.
“Offshore wind energy can enhance our energy and economic security with substantial environmental benefits. Thousands of gigawatts of offshore wind power are available along the US coastline. Making offshore wind cost competitive enables reduction of our dependency on fossil fuels,” Huynh said.
The proposed system is constructed using a few active power devices and drastically reduces the need for bulky filter capacitors even when processing megawatts of power. The system is designed and controlled to make the power electronics play the role of the filter element in addition to a power-processing element. The significant reduction in the number of active power devices and capacitors allows the system to have lower cost, higher conversion efficiency, and higher reliability compared to the state-of-the-art.
“From an energy-conversion perspective in offshore wind turbines, a small increase in wind speed results in a massive increase in electricity generation. A steady wind speed allows near-constant power delivered to the electric grid. These features make the construction of megawatt-scale offshore wind farms highly attractive to meet our ever-increasing demand for steady and green electricity,” Huynh explained.
This research has been partially supported by the Grainger Center for Electric Machinery and Electromechanics. The paper “Active Voltage-Ripple Compensation in an Integrated Generator-Rectifier System” will be available in IEEExplore.

Excerpted from ECE Illinois article written by Ryann Monahan

Watch this explainer video from the team at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign about the arpa-e project “Distributed Grid Control of Flexible Loads and DERs for Optimized Provision of Synthetic Regulating Reserves” and see how HIL is involved in these kinds of Microgrid projects.

Check out this Blog article highlighting DERs:  ARPA-E virtual both blog article

Nathan Brooks, Prof. Pilawa, and Zichao Ye

Nathan Charles Brooks and Zichao Ye, advisees of associate professor Robert Pilawa-Podgurski, each received a best paper award at the 2017 IEEE Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics (COMPEL) hosted by Stanford University. COMPEL consists of keynote speeches, workshops, lectures and individual submissions and is known for renowned researchers in the field of power electronics. Two of the five Best Paper Awards (out of 198 presentations) were awarded to CEME students.

Nathan’s paper, “Control Design of an Active Power Pulsation Buffer Using an Equivalent Series-Resonant Impedance Model,” co-authored by Shibin Qin, derives and validates a new ac to dc power converter control method, which will lead to higher efficiency and smaller size. Applications range from datacenters and electric vehicles, to LED lighting. Brooks received his electrical engineering BS from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in 2016, and is in his second year at Illinois pursuing his PhD in electrical engineering. As an engineer, he enjoys the practical application of science on real-world problems, and power electronics “constantly satiates his desire to explore and learn diverse and challenging ideas.”

Ye’s paper, “Investigation of Capacitor Voltage Balancing in Practical Implementations of Flying Capacitor Multilevel Converters,” co-authored by Yutian Lei and Zitao Liao, investigates the capacitor voltage imbalance issue of the popular multi-level power converter topology. Key applications benefiting from Ye’s research discoveries are power converters for electric vehicles such as cars and future aircraft, along with high efficiency data centers. Ye received his bachelor’s degree in 2014 from ECE ILLINOIS and is now in his fourth year pursuing his PhD in electrical engineering. He likes power electronics because of its interdisciplinary nature and hands-on approach to engineering. He states, “the world is always going to have continued power needs, and power electronics is a subject that requires very broad understanding and intersects many disciplinary areas. Knowledge of circuit design, control, electromagnetics, and thermal management are just some of many fields necessary to address power electronics design from a system perspective.”

Brooks said that studying with Professor Pilawa, “we get the chance to work on some exciting projects realizing and improving the design of electric aircraft, data center power delivery, and solar-photovoltaics amongst others, which even now begin to dramatically affect people’s lives.” Ye added, “It is my great pleasure to work in this amazing research group… and as everyone is so hard-working, you will never find the labs uninhabited.”

Professor Pilawa-Podgurski was thrilled to see his students’ work recognized. He concludes, “COMPEL is the top power electronics control conference in the world, and it is a great opportunity for the students to share the results of their work with the leaders of our field. Nathan and Zichao worked very hard to not only perform research at the highest level, but also to clearly present their results in both written and oral communication. It is always great when such efforts are noticed by our peers, and it encourages us to keep pushing for excellence in research.”

Taken from an article by Joseph Park, ECE ILLINOIS

Illinois professors and graduate students are collaborating with NASA to help more-electric aircraft take flight. This means that electric machines and power electronics must have both ultra-high efficiency and be lightweight in the 1 MW power class. Prof. Haran and his team of graduate students presented results from recent spin tests, manufacturing insights, loss validation measurements, and winding quality analysis for their 1 MW high-speed, low-inductance, permanent magnetic machine prototype.

Haran and Pilawa groups at NASA annual review

To drive Prof. Haran’s electric motor, Prof. Pilawa and his team are developing flying capacitor multilevel inverters. The research presentations by both the Haran and the Pilawa research groups were well received during the NASA Annual Review at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Prof. Haran’s team includes graduate students: Andy Yoon, Xuan Yi, Nathaniel Renner, Aaron Anderson, Jackson Lenz, Xiaolong Zhang, Austin Jin, Dongsu  Lee, and Lijun Zheng. Prof. Pilawa’s team includes: Nate Pallo, Thomas Foulkes, Chris Barth, and Samantha Coday.

CEME Collaborator Prof. Ron Harley

It is with great sadness that Professor Tom Habetler writes to let you know of the passing of our friend and colleague, Ron Harley. Ron passed away at his home last night, surrounded by family and friends, after a battle with cancer.

In 1999, Ron joined the Georgia Tech School of ECE, where he held the Duke Power Distinguished Professorship. He was appointed as a Regents’ Professor in 2009 and also served as the electrical energy technical interest group chair. Ron was highly respected and admired by his colleagues here in ECE, at Georgia Tech, and in his IEEE professional societies in controls, industry applications, power engineering, power electronics, and neural networks. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 1999, he was on the faculty for 27 years at the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa, where he served as a professor, electrical engineering department head, and dean of engineering. He was a Fellow of IEEE, IET (London), Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa, and Member of the Academy of Science in South Africa.

Ron was a visiting professor at the Georgia Tech School of ECE in 1994-95 and also served as a visiting professor at Iowa State University and Clemson University. He published over 600 journal and conference papers, and he graduated almost 40 Ph.D. students and over 50 M.S. students throughout his career. He was a popular teacher and mentor with both undergraduate and graduate students, and for the last 10 years, he advised undergraduate research teams through our Opportunity Research Scholars Program.

Ron is survived by his wife, June; daughters Ilona, of Durban, and Linda, who is a faculty member in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering; and two granddaughters. He was preceded in death by his son, Keith.