Category: In the News

Thomas A. Lipo Assistant Professor Jinia Roy, who has academic, government and industry research experience, is bringing a broad expertise in power conversion to WEMPEC. At WEMPEC, Jinia says she wants to continue with her wide portfolio of previous research interests and hopes to also work on the power conversion needed within electric vehicles. She also plans to explore applications where pulsed power technologies are gaining traction like laser, radar, and other industrial processes including water treatment and ozone generation.

As part of her Clinic Electrification Project, which aims to create a free, open-source toolkit any NGO or rural healthcare clinic can use to optimally size a renewable energy network, or microgrid, for their area, Rebecca Alcock (Ph.D. student in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering) and WEMPEC Ph.D. student Rafael Castillo Sierra traveled to Tezhumke, Colombia, to do a case study on how this toolkit performs.

Please join us in extending a warm welcome to Dr. Lei Zhou! She will join the Department of Mechanical Engineering and WEMPEC as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2023.

In celebration of Earth Day 2023, Wisconsin Department of Administration Secretary Kathy Blumenfeld toured the Great Lakes Community Conservation Corps (GLCCC) in Racine to learn about the e-Little Free Library, a community project developed by GLCCC and WEMPEC Prof. Giri Venkataramanan at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

WEMPEC student Maitreyee Marathe was one of five UW-Madison College of Engineering students to win an award for the Flash Talk session at the Energy Research Showcase hosted by the Wisconsin Energy Institute on February 17th, 2023. Marathe’s project, Optimal Energy Rationing for Prepaid Electricity Customers, “considers forecasts of future use and knowledge of appliance power ratings to help customers prioritize and limit use of low-priority appliances, with the goal of extending access to their critical appliances.”

ECE Professor Bulent Sarlioglu and Graduate Advisor Justin Kyle Bush team up to discuss the online Master of Science program in Power Engineering and the Capstone Certificate in Power Conversion and Control. In this webinar, you can hear about each program and its direct application in industry.

In fall 2022, UW-Madison PhD student James Swanke spent several weeks at the NASA Electric Aircraft Testbed (NEAT) facility near Sandusky, Ohio, performing the final tests on a one- megawatt electric aircraft propulsion motor. His extended visit was the culmination of a five-year multi-university research project, a capstone of Swanke’s PhD research and a promising step forward in the field of electrified aviation.

McFarland-Bascom Professor Nader Behdad and Jean van Bladel Associate Professor Daniel Ludois in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are part of a multi-year research effort to significantly boost the performance of electrically small antennas (ESAs) — or antennas that are much smaller than the wavelength of signals they send and receive. The project is funded by Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the research and development arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.