WEMPEC Faculty Affiliates Spotlight

Over the past year, WEMPEC has formalized its collaborative research relationships with numerous University of Wisconsin faculty members with the WEMPEC Faculty Affiliates program. We feel that our students will benefit from the opportunity to engage with the other faculty members and their research teams, and we know that our industry members will benefit from the added breadth in our technology domain. We are excited to introduce our Faculty Affiliates in the December newsletter.

Visiting Scholars at WEMPEC

WEMPEC is thrilled to introduce this year’s Visiting Scholars, who are finally able to join us on campus again, and in the NASA project, OSU and WEMPEC have completed integration testing of the 1MW integrated modular motor drive (IMMD) for electric aircraft propulsion in Madison.

With NASA funding, multi-university team aims to get electric planes off the ground

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.

ECE faculty are integral to IARPA project to improve electrically small antennas

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.

WEMPEC Researchers win Electric Aircraft Technologies Symposium best paper award

A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty and students won the best paper award at the IEEE/AIAA Transportation Electrification Conference and Electric Aircraft Technologies Symposium (ITEC+EATS) in Anaheim, California, in June 2022.

The team includes Bulent Sarlioglu, the Jean van Bladel Associate Professor in electrical and computer engineering, Thomas Jahns, the Grainger Emeritus Professor of Power Electronics and Electric Machines and PhD students Hao Zeng and James Swanke.

Power up: Little Free Libraries add solar charging to boxes

A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison students is working to provide charging power to Wisconsin communities by developing high-tech Little Free Libraries. Powered by solar energy, eLittle Free Libraries (eLFL) are traditional Little Free Libraries with books, but combined with charging stations for phones and other portable smart devices.

Power to the people

Three ways our nation’s electrical grid must change for a brighter future – an article based on interviews with WEMPEC professor Giri Venkataramanan and WEMPEC affiliate professors Line Roald and Dominic Gross.