Samuel Utomi with Advisor Prof. Alejandro Dominguez Garcia There has been a proliferation of distributed energy resources (DERs) due to their reduced cost and the desire to increase grid infrastructure reliability and stability. This has led to the viable integration of decentralized generation and the need to find innovative control strategies to obtain optimal performance. […]
A Five-Level Flying Capacitor Multi-Level Converter with Integrated Auxiliary Supply and Start-Up
PhD student Andrew Stillwell with advisor R. Pilawa-Podgurski Flying capacitor multi-level (FCML) converters are capacitor-baser power converters that provide high-density and high-efficiency power conversion for dc-dc and dc-ac applications. In many of these applications, there is a need for an auxiliary power supply for control, thermal management, or secondary loads. This auxiliary supply is traditionally […]
Illini Solar Car
Illini Solar Car is a multidisciplinary team of students who designs and builds solar cars to race in cross-country solar races like the World Solar Challenge and the American Solar Challenge. These races allow the students to both apply their technical knowledge to build a road-worthy car, and learn soft skills in managing race logistics, […]
Development of Form-Wound Air-Core Armature Windings for High-Frequency Electric Machines
Nate Renner with adviser K. Haran This project, funded by NASA Glen, is to develop a permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM) capable of significantly increasing power density. The goal is to enable electric propulsion in future hybrid and fully electric aircraft. My research has focused on the manufacturing and qualification of form-wound air-gap armature windings, […]
Control and Design of Power Factor Correction System with Flying Capacitor Multilevel Boost Front-end and Active Energy Buffer
Zitao Liao with adviser R. Pilawa-Podgurski Power factor correction front-ends are widely used in ac-dc conversion applications. For conventional boost-converter based designs, two of the major limitations to achieve high power density are the size of the boost converter’s input filter inductor and the twice-line frequency energy buffer capacitor bank. In this work, the input-filter […]
Electrical Qualification of Form-Wound Air-Core Armature Windings for High Speed Electrical Machines
Jackson Lenz with Advisor Professor Kiruba S. Haran To ensure that armature windings can withstand the intense electrical conditions presented by a high voltage, high frequency, drive, they must be electrically qualified to prevent turn-to-turn, phase-to-phase, and phase-to-ground shorts. Specialty impulse winding test (IWT) hardware is used to accurately qualify the turn-turn insulation of low […]
Demagnetization Analysis on High Power Permanent Magnet Machine
Austin Jin with advisor K. Haran Because of environmental concerns about increasing use of jet fuels, there is a call for more environmentally friendly and fuel-efficient aircraft. Our project aims to address this goal by implementing high frequency, high-pole designs for high power density electric machines. Among various machine topologies, permanent magnet synchronous machines (PMSM) […]
Illini Formula Electric
The 2017 Formula SAE Electric competition in Lincoln, Nebraska on June 20-24 marked our largest success since we switched from a hybrid-electric team to all-electric team several years ago. We passed the electrical and mechanical technical inspections and ran in the dynamic events. This is a huge breakthrough for us since we were not even […]
A DATA-DRIVEN APPROACH TO ESTIMATED FREQUENCY DISTURBANCE PROPAGATION SPEED IN THE INTERCONNECTED POWER SYSTEM
PhD Student Phuc Huynh with Advisor Hao Zhu When a big disturbance occurs at one location in a large-scale power system, very shortly afterwards other locations (even thousands of miles apart) will be affected. In severe cases, blackouts could be widespread. At around 6 pm on February 26, 2008, a blackout occurred in Florida. Millions […]
Solar Variability Reduction in Solar Arrays Using Off-MPP Tracking and Energy Storage Systems
Jason Galtieri with advisor Prof. Philip T. Krein Maximum power point (MPP) tracking is the standard control scheme for photovoltaic (PV) arrays of all sizes. Inverter tracking algorithms work on second to sub-second time scales and can track most naturally occurring irradiance changes, such as moving cloud coverage. Fast response tracking imposes large power swings […]