Welcome to the Georgia Tech Electric Machines Lab! We are a research group in the area of electric machines and power electronics. We focus on harnessing the power of electric machines in four different perspectives:
- harnessing wattage for electrification
- more sustainably unleashing the power of electric machines
- electric machines as engineering object for design methodology innovation
- electric machines research in the era of artificial intelligence
Prospective Students: if you have a keen interest in any of these outlooks, or simply love engineering, physics, computer science, and math, come and join us!
Harnessing Wattage for Electrification
Imagine you are traveling back in time (1000 yrs, 2000 yrs, and even more) and staying there and you are allowed to bring one technology with you. What would it be? Electric machinery may be a great choice and viable option. Since being invented by Michael Faraday, electric motors and generators have been fueling the forefront of human imagination, including power grid, industrial automation, electric vehicles, robotics, etc. In fact, through electric machines, >90% of global electricity is generated and 45% of which is turned into mechanical work. The usage of electric motors is growing strongly in the era of electrification.
More Sustainably Unleashing the Power of Electric Machines
Manufacturing electric machines demands large quantities of specific natural resources, namely iron, copper, and often times rare-earth elements. The ubiquitous usage of electric machines in modern society stresses the supply of these natural resources. For example, converting all on-road vehicles into battery electric vehicles would consume ~1.9M tons of neodymium, constituting 24% of the world reserve.
So, can we design electric machines using less or even none of the critical materials?
And can we still achieve competitive torque/power/efficiency performance?
Exploring New Electric Machines and Power Converters
Current designs of new electric machines are usually conceived by designers based on experience and intuition. This process is sporadic by nature, however. There exists a wide variety of electric machines, yet still a large performance space is uncharted (e.g., PMVM has an impressive shear stress capability, but its CPSR is poor; other EMs with good CPSR do not have shear stress capability comparable to PMVMs).
Is it possible to streamline the discovery of new electric machines?
And how to efficiently explore performance space?
What about power converters?
Advanced Control
Thanks to the development of theories, solid-state power electronics, and the ever-increasing performance of microcontrollers, the control of electric machines has evolved from load-dependent control before 1950s, to V/Hz control in 1960s, to field oriented control in 1970s, and to direct torque control in 1980s. The performance of microcontrollers has grown significantly in the last few decades and far exceeded the requirement of classical control methods.
What can we do with the excess computational power to enhance the performance of energy conversion?
Magnetic Material Modeling
The design of electric machines, power converters, and control algorithms often involves dealing with the non-idealities of magnetic materials, including saturation, hysteresis, and eddy current effects. Their loss modeling has been mostly carried out empirically. The usage of switching-mode power supplies introduces an extra layer of difficulty.
How to accurately model core losses including hysteresis loss and eddy current loss?
How to dynamically predict magnetic behavior to facilitate high-fidelity virtual prototyping of power magnetics?