FUTURE ENERGY ELECTRONICS CENTER

The Future Energy Electronics Center (FEEC), part of The Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, promotes and develops energy-efficient electronic technologies for the transportation and industrial automation industries. The Center's capabilities include, modeling, simulation, design and testing of power-electronics devices, components, circuits and systems. FEEC is currently working on a DOE awarded project where a team of PhD students will integrate a developed inverter with an existing medium-voltage AC-to-DC converter to build a bidirectional solid-state transformer that converts low-voltage AC to high-voltage AC, without using heavy, low-frequency materials, such as copper and iron in its design. If successful, the project could lead to the first commercially viable medium-voltage solid-state transformer, using just a single-stage process to obtain ultra-high efficiency power conversion. In 2016, FEEC graduate students participated in the Google Little Box Challenge and designed a 28.84in3 inverter. FEEC’s team was the only university team to finish within the top three and the only team to satisfy all criteria, https://ece.vt.edu/news/article/future-energy-electronics-center-team-places-3rd-in-google-inverter-competition . FEEC students also participated in the IEEE 2011 International Future Energy Challenge, (IFEC) where VT’s FEEC team won both the Grand Prize and the Outstanding Performance Award. In 2019 four under-graduates, Keyue Shan, Junxian Yao, MianLaio and Zhengming Hou were invited to FEEC, while they participate in the Future Energy Challenge. The IFEC Team designed an electric bicycle motor drive, using a variable speed, three-phase brushless DC motor drive, (http://energychallenge.weebly.com/ifec-2019.html) . In recent years, FEEC's Director, Dr. Jason Lai’s students have participated in and won the Engibous Prize in the National Texas Instruments' Analog University Design Contest.