This CAREER proposal focuses on the integration of research and teaching in the undergraduate and graduate programs of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Principal Investigator (PI) is collaborating with industry to develop a contingency screening tool for voltage collapse that will predict the distance to collapse given any generator unit outage, any single branch outage, or any multiterminal branch outage. In addition, the PI is creating new undergraduate courses on Industrial Drives and Power Electronics, and new graduate courses on Power Transaction Management. Lastly, the PI is developing new relationships with industry to attract students and faculty to the American Power Conference, thereby promoting the fascinating field of power engineering.
The PI's research agenda for the next four years is centered on the research and development of robust and efficient computational tools for analyzing nonlinear steady-state behavior of large-scale electric power systems in a competitive environment. The PI's educational agenda is centered on new discovery opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of (i) stability and control of large-scale power systems, (ii) industrial drives, and (iii) power electronics. The PI's service agenda is centered on the recruitment of talented engineers for the electric power industry.
This Career Development Plan will help the power engineering discipline in its time of need, which is now! The electric power industry is facing a tremendous challenge brought on by deregulation. The challenge is obvious: power engineering is seen by undergraduates as a slowly dying field that does not have any career potential, while at the same time the electric power industry is in dire need of attracting new engineers to build, operate, maintain, control, and manage the distributed power generating plants, the tightly woven web of transmission networks, the vital distribution capallaries, and the liberated customer service market. The goal of this proposal is to integrate research and teaching with the direct result that industry will benefit from both activities.
