Grainger CEME

Center for Electric Machinery and Electromechanics

Electric Field Jumping Droplet Condensation for Active Hot Spot Cooling of High Power Density Electronics

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Thomas Foulkes with advisers N. Miljkovic and R. Pilawa-Podgurski Catalyzing the electrification of mobile transportation platforms such as ships and aircraft will require volume and weight reductions in packaged electronics for computation, power delivery, and propulsion, because of the combination of the reduced surface area for extracting heat and the harsh environments inside these systems. […]

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Differential Power Processing for Voltage Regulation of Series-Stacked Processor Cores

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Dipanjan Das with Advisor P. Krein Power delivery to multi-core processors is becoming increasingly challenging with decreasing transistor sizes and, thereby, their operating voltages. With the increase in number of cores in each processor, the power requirements tend to remain the same with each new generation of microprocessors, and handling transient performance requirements along with […]

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Combined Thermal and Electrical Design for High Density Power Converters in Electric Vehicles

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Derek Chou with Advisor R. Pilawa-Podgurski Wide-bandgap semiconductor devices such as gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) have found use in power electronics as high-performance switches, allowing for higher frequency switching with minimal losses; this in turn reduces the required physical size of many of the passive components required in such designs, mainly the […]

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A Series-Stacked Power Delivery Architecture for Data Centers

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Enver Candan with adviser Robert Pilawa-Podgurski   As high-performance computation and data storage are moved to cloud services, data centers have seen an increased need for high power delivery in computing and storage modules. This research seeks to demonstrate how a series-stacked architecture leveraging an inherently high-efficiency power delivery architecture can be used to improve […]

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Active Power Decoupling in High Power Density Single-Phase DC-AC and AC-DC Converters

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Nathan Brooks with advisor Prof. Robert Pilawa-Podgurski   Single-phase ac-dc and dc-ac converters have fundamental power processing limitations at twice the ac line frequency. The conventional solution for twice-line cycle energy storage utilizes a large dc link capacitor across the dc bus to buffer the instantaneous energy difference between the ac and dc side. This […]

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Control of Flying Capacitor Inverters for Motor Drive Applications

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PhD student Christopher Barth with advisor R. Pilawa-Podgurski Funding Source: NASA motor and inverter project   Flying capacitor multilevel inverter (FCML) topology has been shown to enable high power density and efficiency. In order to ensure maximum efficiency and reliability, it is advantageous to power large loads by operating many inverters in parallel. This provides […]

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A Paradigm for Utilizing Distributed Energy Resources to Provide Frequency Regulation Services

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PhD student Olaoluwapo Ajala with advisors A. Domínguez-García and P. W. Sauer              The goal of the project is to enable the utilization of distributed energy resources (DERs) generation, storage resources, and flexible loads to provide frequency regulation services to the grid. We assume there is an entity, referred to […]

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Invariant-Manifold-Based Distributed Voltage Regulation and Frequency Regulation of Islanded Microgrid

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PhD student Madi Zholbaryssov with advisor A. Domínguez-García We propose a distributed controller for voltage regulation in islanded ac microgrids with lossy lines and present stability analysis without assuming decoupled operation of the frequency and voltage controllers; the frequency controller achieves the active power load-sharing by driving the power flows to a certain manifold, and […]

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Decentralized Control of Distributed Energy Resources in Lossy Power Networks

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PhD student Hanchen Xu with advisors A. Domínguez-García and P. Sauer Frequency regulation is utilized in a power system to track the moment-to-moment load fluctuations in near real-time, and ensure generation and load are balanced in each control area. An alternative to the conventional regulation generators, the distributed energy resources (DERs) can also aggregately provide […]

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Distributed Grid Control of Flexible Loads and DERs for Optimized Provision of Synthetic Regulating Reserves

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PhD student Olaoluwapo Ajala with advisors A. Domínguez-García and P. W. Sauer The goal of the project is to enable the utilization of distributed energy resources (DERs) generation, storage resources, and flexible loads to provide frequency regulation services to the grid. We assume there is an entity, referred to as aggregator that operates (and possibly […]

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