Powering up

The Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management – FREEDM – Systems Center had a lot of new technology to show off to National Science Foundation (NSF) officials during the center’s sixth site visit this spring.

The Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management – FREEDM – Systems Center had a lot of new technology to show off to National Science Foundation (NSF) officials during the center’s sixth site visit this spring.

FREEDM – an NSF Engineering Research Center led by NC State and tasked with changing the nation’s power grid to accommodate renewable energy and enable bi-directional power flow, started in 2008 with an $18.5-million NSF grant. The addition of the ASSIST Center in 2012 made NC State the only university in the country to lead two ERCs at once and one of only two schools (along with Carnegie Mellon University) to ever be awarded the lead role in three.

The center – which includes partner institutions Florida State University, Florida A&M University, Arizona State University and Missouri University of Science and Technology and international partners Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and RWTH Aachen University in Aachen, Germany – is based in the Keystone Science Center on NC State’s Centennial Campus.

“The review went well from our perspective,” said Rogelio Sullivan, managing director of the center. “We successfully demonstrated several of our energy technologies (solid state transformer, fault isolation device, communication and control systems) integrated into our Green Energy Hub laboratory, and they performed well.”

Hulgize Kassa, laboratory manager for FREEDM, works at FREEDM, located in the Keystone Science Center on NC State’s Centennial campus.

Officials from NSF visiting in May saw two hours of technology  demonstrations conducted by FREEDM students that included a look at FREEDM’s Green Energy Hub, a model of the home of the future powered, in part, by renewables and able to send the extra energy it produces back into the grid.

Guided by NSF feedback from the visit, the FREEDM leadership team is redoubling efforts to recruit more domestic students, female students and students from underrepresented groups to study at the center through a recharged marketing effort and the hiring of a recruiting specialist. The NSF also asked FREEDM to analyze how cost-effective the center’s innovations will be in the real world and to seek more outside guidance from the center’s Scientific Advisory Board.

The center saw a change in leadership in year six, as director Dr. Alex Huang stepped down earlier this year to devote more time to research. Huang was responsible for envisioning the center, building the team, leading the research, and successfully guiding its growth for the first five years. Dr. Iqbal Husain, ABB Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is the center’s new director.

FREEDM continues to graduate a significant number of the power engineers nationwide, according to Sullivan, and these graduates are being quickly snapped up by many of the center’s industry partners.

Other successes include three start-up companies that have grown, in part, from licensing of center-developed technology. GridBridge, a developer of technologies designed to improve power management on the grid, is based on Centennial Campus.

Some of the biggest news for FREEDM this year, though, came on another part of NC State’s campus. President Barack Obama came to Raleigh in January to announce that the university would lead the Next Generation Power Electronics Manufacturing Innovation Institute (now called PowerAmerica), a $140 million Department of Energy initiative that aims to create jobs while furthering development, deployment and domestic manufacturing of wide bandgap semiconductors.

These new semiconductors can operate at a higher temperature, voltage, and frequency than traditional silicon semiconductors, making it possible to reduce the size, weight, volume and life cycle costs in a wide range of energy, consumer, and industrial applications.

Led by Huang, the faculty and staff from FREEDM had the vision, conceived a comprehensive concept, recruited the industry partners, and wrote the winning proposal that brought the institute to Raleigh, Sullivan said.

Credit:  NCSU Engr News Article “Powering up”