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Jingjing Sun and Jin Zhao Present the CURENT Power and Energy Seminar on Friday, March 5

Jingjing Sun and Jin Zhao, both graduate students at CURENT at the University of Tennessee, will present the CURENT Power and Energy Seminar (ECE 496 and 691) on Friday, March 5 from 1:00 pm to 1:50 pm. The seminar will be available via ZOOM. The ZOOM link will be sent to CURENT students and faculty through email. Contact Wendy if you need a link.

Presenter: Jingjing Sun, University of Tennessee

Title: Emulation of Voltage Sag Event of a Data Center Power Distribution System

Abstract: Data centers have become a widespread power electronics (PE) load, with significant impact on the power grid. In order to investigate the data center load characteristics and help evaluate the grid dynamic performance, this work develops a data center power emulator based on a reconfigurable PE converter-based hardware testbed (HTB). A generalized discrete model is proposed to establish the emulator that is implemented in two voltage source inverters (VSIs). The accuracy of the emulator has been verified experimentally in a regional network. Dynamic performances during voltage sag events are emulated and discussed. The proposed power emulator provides an effective, easy-to-use tool to better design the data center and study the power system.

Bio: Jingjing Sun was born in Shandong, China. She received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China, in 2016, and the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA, in 2018.  Since 2016, She has started to work towards Ph.D degree under supervision of Dr. Leon M. Tolbert at the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA. Her research focuses on data center power system modeling and emulation, application of wide bandgap (WBG) devices, high-efficiency power supply design, high-frequency soft-switching power converters.

Presenter: Jin Zhao, University of Tennessee

Title: Spatio-temporal Coordination of Load Restoration Considering Renewable Energy Participation

Abstract: The work is inspired by the southern Australia blackout and Arizona-Southern California blackout. It handles the decision-making problem in the RES penetrated uncertain load restoration process, the multi-level grid coordination problem, and the multi-time scale decision coordination problem. Firstly, a utility-based load restoration optimization method is proposed to deal with the decision-making problem under uncertain conditions. Secondly, a decentralized load restoration scheme is proposed in order to realize efficient restoration coordination in the coupled transmission and distribution (T&D) system. Finally, a conditional value-at-risk based two-stage receding horizon method is proposed for the efficient dynamic load restoration decision-making in the RES penetrated T&D system. The goal of the series of studies is to properly apply RES to speed up the load recovery. The validity of the research results has been verified in actual power systems such as the northeast grid of Shandong Province and Dongying T&D system, China.

Bio: Jin Zhao received the B.E. and Ph.D. degrees from Shandong University, Jinan, China, all in the electrical engineering, in 2015 and 2020, respectively. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Tennessee (UTK), USA. She was a research assistant at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), China. She was also a visiting Ph.D. student and postdoctoral researcher at Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Denmark. Her research interests include power system resilience, transmission & distribution system restoration, renewable energy integration, power system optimization, deep learning and reinforcement learning.

Upcoming seminars are: 

Mar. 12 - Weikang Wang, University of Tennessee and TBD TBA

Mar. 19 - Yu Yan, University of Tennessee, and Yu Su, University of Tennessee  - TBA

Mar. 26 - Industry Seminar - Dr. Yue Li and Dr. Xiong Yu, Case Western Reserve University

Apr. 2 - Spring Recess - No Seminar

Apr. 9 - TBD TBA

Apr. 16 - TBD TBA

Apr. 23 - Industry Seminar - Rob Lefebvre, Oak Ridge National Laboratory - TBA