We are thrilled to report that the Illinois Solar Decathlon construction of the RENU-House is mostly complete. A public exhibition showing our progress was held on April 15 and 16, 2023. We would like to express our gratitude to Grainger Center for Electric Machinery and Electromechanics for their support, which has enabled us to turn […]
Illinois Formula Electric
Michael Stoens continues, “Over the past year, we have completely redesigned our vehicle to be at the forefront of innovation within the formula student competition. Our new vehicle features a 600V battery pack with a fully custom battery management system, an all-wheel drive implementation with AMK Motion-Quad inverters, and in-hub motors with custom planetary gearboxes. […]
Reduced-Order Modeling of Inverter and Synchronous Generator-based Power Networks
MS student Ethan WIlliams with Advisor A. Domínguez-García Stability has become an increasing concern with the growing penetration of renewable energy sources into power systems because of the decrease in system inertia as synchronous generation is replaced by inverter-based generation and other aspects. Specifically, given the wide variety of control strategies implemented for inverter-based resources, […]
Real Time Modeling of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Power Grid
MS student Ethan WIlliams with Advisor A. Domínguez-García Typhoon HIL, a controller-hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform, can accurately capture power-system dynamic phenomena occurring at super-fast time scales (microseconds), much faster than conventional simulators such as MATLAB/Simulink. Further, Typhoon HIL provides a flexible development environment where power systems and associated components can be modeled and easily configured, allowing […]
A Resilient Distributed Platform for Microgrid Control Environmental Security Technology Certification Program
PhD student Eric Silk with Advisor A. Domínguez-García The goal of this project is to develop and demonstrate a software framework for the control of microgrids by using distributed algorithms. My contributions thus far have largely involved applying modern software practices to convert existing code to a platform-agnostic implementation, i.e., one that run on any […]
A Quasi-Newton Algorithm for Solving the Power-Flow Problem in Inverter-Based Power Systems
PhD student Temitope Amuda with Advisor A. Domínguez-García Commercial power-flow solvers compute the solution to the single slack-based power-flow problem using conventional approaches such as the Newton-Raphson or the Gauss-Seidel methods. In the conventional power-flow formulation, a single bus with a fixed normalized voltage and angle is dedicated to carrying all the slack in the […]
Primary and Secondary Control of Dispatchable Virtual Oscillator-Controlled Grid-Forming Inverters
PhD student T.G. Roberts with Advisor A. Domínguez-García Grid-forming inverters (GFMs) are a promising technology for replacing synchronous generators to sustain system voltage and frequency in microgrids with low inertia. In the U.S. bulk power grid, inertia from rotating generators helps resist sudden changes or fluctuations in frequency. Currently, grid-following inverters do not possess the […]
Extracting Power from ECEB Research Solar Panels Using Distributed Controllers
Intern Zhan Su and PhD Student Matthew Qi with Advisor A. Banerjee Illinois’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Building has sixty 400W solar panels dedicated solely for research. This project, funded by the Grainger CEME, aims to create an efficient, reliable, and safe hardware framework to extract power from these solar panels and feed it to […]
200-kW Integrated Generator-Rectifier Prototype for Wind Energy Systems
Post-doc Debranjan Mukherjee with Advisor A. Banerjee Offshore wind energy conversion systems are receiving increased attention due to high and steady wind potential and minimum environmental effects. Our group has proposed an integrated generator-rectifier architecture. The generator considered has multiple three-phase ac ports. Most of them are connected to diode-bridge rectifiers, while one is connected […]
Investigating Optimal Inverter Topologies for Electric Aviation Application
MS student Arjit Bali with Advisor A. Stillwell Achieving high power density is crucial for electric aviation applications. Having a high system voltage (in the kilovolt range) allows us to save weight by using lower-current rated conductors. Because, at present, we have only a few switching devices that support such high voltages, there is a […]