The ECCE USA 2014 Energy Conversion Congress and Expo conference sponsored by the IEEE Power Electronics and Industry Applications societies is a premier international conference for discussing the next generation technologies in the field of power electronics. The main focus of the conference is the research and industrial advancements related to sustainable energy future. It was held in Pittsburgh, PA, USA during September 14-18th 2014.
The conference had 12 tutorials, 4 plenary sessions and 2 town hall meetings on very interesting and exciting topics in power electronics. It is one of the biggest conferences consisting of 125 oral and 36 poster sessions. It also has industrial exhibition, industrial seminars, and student demonstrations.
The conference provided the unique opportunity to interact with the experts in academia and industry and with other researchers in power electronics.
Prasanth Thummala PhD student from the Electronics Group at DTU Electrical Engineering presented a paper on “Digital control of a 2.5 KV bidirectional DC-DC converter” in collaboration with the Colorado Power Electronics Center (CoPEC), University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. The co-authors of the paper are Dragan Maksimovic, Zhe Zhang, and Michael A. E. Andersen.
Prasanth says: “During the conference I have met my friends and colleagues from India and USA. I have also built networking with people - both from Industry and Academia. Some of the audience showed a special attention in my new research topic (charging and discharging a high voltage capacitive actuator), since the high voltage bidirectional driver is made using a special 4 kV / 4.5 kV MOSFET on the high voltage side”.
Prasanth also got a travel grant of $500 for attending the conference. The travel grant was sponsored by the IEEE Industry Applications Society (IAS) and the Power Electronics Society (PELS).