ECE 590 I POWER & ENERGY SYSTEMS SEMINAR
WHEN: Monday, April 11, 2022
WHERE: ECEB 1013, 4:00 – 4:50 p.m., ZOOM Meeting ID: 848 1899 8893, Password: power
SPEAKER: Macks Johanesen, Electrical and Computer Engineering, UIUC
TITLE: "Design of a Single-Phase Inverter With Optimal Reactive Power Support"
ABSTRACT: When reactive power is not locally compensated at each demand node, the delivery over transmission lines of the supply injections may entail active power line losses. Single phase inverters can be deployed for local reactive power compensation in addition to the DC to AC conversion, but typically these devices are used to produce optimal power factor outputs. Inverter hardware may be used to result in optimal reactive power support that enables a desired power factor range of operation. Large output filter inductors add additional reactive power load, which requires a larger DC bus capacitor to buffer the double line frequency energy. A flying capacitor multilevel (FCML) inverter topology can be utilized to increase the effective switching of the inverter to limit the size of the output inductor and the DC bus capacitor. We discuss the implementation of a scaled design of a 4-level FCML and describe its performance over a large power factor range.
SPEAKER: Mingrui Zhu, Electrical and Computer Engineering, UIUC
TITLE: "Analysis and Design of Supercapacitor-based Pulse De-icing in Solar Panel Applications"
ABSTRACT: There is increasing concern with the deleterious impacts of extreme weather events on the operations of the electric generation systems. For example, electric pulse de-icing mechanisms has been in use in certain sectors, including electric aircraft and PV solar panel applications. In this presentation, we examine the nature of current solutions for the general de-icing purposes and focus on the specification of system parameters for power rating and power density. We discuss the key advantages of pulse-de-icing over the conventional electric-thermal approaches. We describe the considerations in the selection of the supercapacitor as the energy storage element and their impacts on the power and energy density features and present a comparison with other storage resources. We also present the topology of the subsystems in our circuit design and illustrate its performance in simulation studies.
