Power Conversion, Conditioning and Control

Power System Instrumentation and Control Laboratory
Raja Ayyanar and Ravi Gorur, Directors

The main issues of power conditioning in the solar energy venue are: maximizing efficiency; compliance with energy or power delivery requirements; maximization of efficiency of the solar energy conversion/conversion to electrical energy/storage/recovery processes. The laboratory facilities and expertise in place consist of solar panel facilities, controls laboratories, and computer control capability. The capability includes a roof top facility, state of the art computer analysis laboratory dedicated to power engineering, and an in-house solar laboratory to evaluate modest size photovoltaic cells. The expertise in this area includes in-depth constrained optimization capability utilizing full professional version Matlab toolbox software. The students working in this area have regularly used the optimization toolbox, and they have experience in conversion of the prototype software to production code that is capable of real time control. Instrumentation includes the most recent time domain and frequency domain instruments, high speed cameras and other visual spectrum instruments, and high power and high voltage measurement facilities. Optical current instruments are in place in the Engineering Research Center building.

Power Electronics Laboratories
Raja Ayyanar and George Karady, Directors

Two newly constructed laboratories for research, design, development and testing of power electronic syste,ms are currently focused in the area of high performance, switch mode power converter design (e.g., DC/DC, DC/AC, mainly in the 1 to 50 kW range, but facilities for higher power tests and instrumentation are in place). Current research involves: novel topologies for DC/DC and DC/AC power conversion that improve the efficiency and power density of converters used in such varied applications as powering modern processors like Intel Pentium to interfacing photovoltaics to grid; new control and communication methods that enable a ‘plug & play’ architecture for high power converters that is particularly well suited for grid interface of distributed energy resources; and high frequency pulse width modulation (PWM) techniques to significantly improve power quality. The facilities have state of the art test equipment and fabrication capability. The staff in the laboratories has regular experience in converter design and testing, machine drives, PWM technology, high frequency conversion, and modular converter design and testing. The laboratories have an array of state-of-the-art power electronics simulation software including SABER, PSpice, MATLAB/Simulink and SimPowerSytems, as well as finite element analysis tools such as Ansoft’s Maxwell 3D and PExpert. A main strength of the power electronics group at ASU is its expertise in digital control of power converters using several DSP and FPGA platforms.