Three students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University under the advisement of Dr. Robert Balog, recently were honored for their research at prestigious conferences.
Mohammad Shadmand (left), a Ph.D. student in the department, won Best Poster award at the Center For Emergency Informatics 2014 Summer Institute on Flooding.
His poster was titled "Design Considerations for Long-Term Remote Photovoltaic-Based Power Supply Using Non-Planar Photovoltaic Surfaces."
Shadmand is a member of the Renewable Energy and Advanced Power Electronics Research (REAPER) lab under the direction of Balog, assistant professor in the department.
Stephen McConnell (center), a master's student and Zhan Wang (right), a Ph.D. student, both in Balog’s REAPER Lab, won Best Poster award in its category on photovoltaic reliability at the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialist Conference in Denver. Their poster was titled “"Evaluation Method for Arc Fault Detection Algorithms.”
This poster presents a portion of Stephen’s undergraduate thesis which he performed under the supervision of Balog.
McConnell and Wang also presented a paper poster titled "Arc Fault Signal Detection - Fourier Transformation vs. Wavelet Decomposition Techniques using Synthesized Data” at the conference.
Shadmand received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Qatar University, Doha, Qatar, in 2010. He received a master's degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M in 2012. Currently he is working toward the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering at Texas A&M.
Shadmand has been a researcher with the REAPER Laboratory since 2010. His research interests include FEA of high-frequency magnetic components, model predictive control, matrix converter, performance analysis of PV systems, and switching power supplies. He was awarded second place in the International IEEE Industrial Application Society Graduate Thesis Contest for his master's thesis in 2013.
McConnell received his bachelor's degree from Texas A&M in May 2014. He graduated as an Undergraduate Research Scholar with the thesis entitled “Photovoltaic Arc-Fault Detection.” He is now enrolled as a master's student and is a member of the REAPER laboratory at Texas A&M. His research interests include signal processing approaches to evaluate DC system performance.
Wang received his B. Sc in electrical engineering – electric machines and drives from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 2010. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree at Texas A&M.
His research interests include switching power supplies, and renewable energy conversion. He is currently working on arc fault detection in photovoltaic DC fields.