Park receives NSF CAREER Award for research on DC Power Systems

Congratulations to Dr. Jaedo Park, assistant professor of electrical engineering, on his National Science Foundation CAREER Award, “Smart Protection for DC Power Systems: Distributed and Proactive Approach.”

DC power systems have received renewed attention due to a number of advantages they offer, such as easy renewable energy resource integration, high-efficiency long distance transmission, and simpler interface with power electronics converters. Applications including microgrids with distributed generators, bulk power transmission, and low-voltage distribution systems have been investigated. However, compared to the control aspects of DC systems that have made sizable progress, system protection has always been a challenge.

This research project will address the protection issues of DC power systems, which will contribute to strengthen an important aspect of DC power systems and can be applied to various applications. Although the protection technology for AC systems has a long history and maturity, it is difficult to directly apply to DC systems because of the non-alternating nature and fast dynamics of DC power. The protection of DC power system needs to take a fundamentally different approach than that of existing AC technologies. Furthermore, complex modern power systems need more intelligence for their operation. The challenges will be investigated taking a distributed and proactive approach based on multi-dimensional intelligence. The research effort will develop system components for fast responses and compound decisions, which provide a protection framework that has swift fault current interruption, accurate fault location, and distributed decision-making based on various system parameters.

The outcomes of this research can be readily utilized in conjunction with other aspects of distributed and/or sustainable energy applications using DC power to generate synergistic effects on overall system reliability improvement. Moreover, the project activities will generate multidisciplinary research and educational impacts on the utilization of advanced artificial intelligence, control and communication technologies to power and energy system area.

Bio:
Dr. Jae-Do Park received his PhD degree from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, in 2007. Park is currently an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado Denver. His research interests are in the energy system applications, such as DC power systems, renewable energy sources, energy harvesting systems, and energy storage systems. Prior to his arrival at the University of Colorado Denver, Park worked for Pentadyne Power Corporation in California as the Manager of Software and Controls, where he took charge of control algorithm design and software development for the high-speed flywheel energy storage system. He also worked at the R&D Center of LG Industrial Systems in Korea, where he developed induction machine drive systems such as high-speed elevator drives and general purpose inverters as a research engineer.