Our aging grid infrastructure faces increasing challenges from multiple sources including greater demand variability, stricter environmental regulations and growing cyber security concerns. Advanced smart grid technologies provide possible solutions to tackle these challenges. Meanwhile how to best utilize these new devices and technologies such as PMUs and electric vehicles remains a challenge by itself. In this talk, I will address various topics which span a multitude of areas including demand response, stochastic optimization for renewable integration, microgrids and cyber security. I will present the technical issues in implementing these technologies and corresponding potential solutions.

Dr. Jianhui Wang is the Section Manager for Advanced Power Grid Modeling at Argonne National Laboratory. He is the Secretary of the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) Power System Operations Committee. He has authored/; co-authored more than 150 journal and conference publications. He is an editor of Journal of Energy Engineering and Applied Energy. He received the IEEE Chicago Section 2012 Outstanding Young Engineer Award and is an Affiliate Professor at Auburn University and an Adjunct Professor at University of Notre Dame. He has also held visiting positions in Europe, Australia and Hong Kong including a VELUX Visiting Professorship at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Dr. Wang is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid and an IEEE PES Distinguished Lecturer. He is the recipient of the IEEE PES Power System Operation Committee Prize Paper Award in 2015.

Nowadays, the conventional power grid infrastructure faces various challenges due to multiple factors such as aging, rapid environmental changes, availability of modern renewable energy resources, and ever increasing power demands. Due to high dependency of the modern world on electricity, it is an immediate need to ameliorate power network through innovative technologies in order to make it more reliable, efficient and economic by keeping the environmental factors in view.

The talk will start by discussing the above-mentioned challenges and potential solutions through state-of-the-art technologies in the areas of power system protection and high voltage engineering. The future trend is towards proactive protection and self-healing networks rather than reactive techniques. Proactive protection by timely fault detection and location leads to valuable decisions to identify the need of repair or replace the affected components. The presentation will also include the introduction of emerging non-intrusive sensing technologies, intelligent algorithms for data interpretation and analysis, fault identification and location. Moreover, I shall present simulation results about non-intrusive sensor modeling along with their validation through laboratory as well as onsite testing. In the end, I shall describe my current and future research projects which are related to smart circuit breakers, arc fault circuit interrupter, protection, and control techniques in AC/DC hybrid power distribution systems.

Dr. Amjad Hussain is a Senior R&D Engineer-Power Systems Technologies in Corporate Research & Technology (CRT) division at EATON European Innovation Centre (EEIC), Prague, the Czech Republic. At EATON, he is involved in state-of-the-art power system projects (R&D), involving advanced protection and control techniques and related commercial products. He has also worked as a Project Engineer from 2008 to 2010 with a major switchgear company in Gulf region and supervised erection and pre-commissioning of MV electrical distribution substations. He received the bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan, in 2007, and the master's and the Ph.D. from Aalto University, School of Electrical Engineering, Finland, in 2012 and 2016 respectively. He has authored/; co-authored more than 30 articles in international journals and conferences and has one patent under review. He is the recipient of awards: The Honorable Mention Paper Prize at IEEE-IAS PCIC Conference 2014, San Francisco and The Best-evaluated Author at IEEE RTUCON 2016, Riga. He received multiple national research grants during doctoral research, total amount €80,000. His research expertise and interests include advanced power system protection, control and reconfiguration techniques in modern smart grids involving Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) and AC/DC hybrid microgrids, power quality, electrical fault detection and location, pre-emptive protection techniques, condition monitoring of power equipment, insulation diagnostic systems, and partial discharge (PD) measurements in MV and HV equipment.

Advances in sensing, communication, and computing have potential to refine, or even redefine the conception and implementation of Power System Protection. Increased computing power at low cost has provided opportunities to implement more computation-intensive methods/algorithms in real time. At the same time, Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) providing faster and diverse synchronized measurements over a wide area and new communication options have also emerged. These advances have the potential to be enablers of new paradigms in Protection. Due to the availability of system-wide high-quality high-volume data in real time, improved System Integrity Protection Schemes (SIPS) and adaptive the same have become possible. Big Data analytics have the potential to detect and locate events, analyze system integrity, and take corrective action for more reliable protection. At the same time, processing and communication delays, bad data, and cyber-attacks pose challenges to security as well as dependability of protection. Novel methods using advanced computing are promising, but should not compromise the clarity and simplicity of the underlying system models and concepts. In this talk, I will present my research on 1) adaptive optimal protective relays coordination in power grid, and 2) a digital relaying power flow calculation algorithm for the wide area measurement to augment/supervise local protection. In addition, I will introduce my research activities on developing the fundamental research in power system protection and its application in the generation, transmission, distribution, and communication systems.

Masoud Barati received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, in 2013. In IIT, he worked at the Robert Galvin Center for Electricity Innovation for 4 years. He was a Visiting Professor in University of Chicago in Summer and Fall 2014. He is currently a Research and Instructional Assistant Professor in University of Houston, Houston, where he joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering department in Fall 2013. He is the co-chair of “Microgrid Protection Systems” subcommittee of “Power System Relaying & Control Committee”. He is the recipient of IEEE Certificate of Appreciation Award for establishment of a workshop on Harmonic Power System in IEEE Chicago section with S&C Company. He has supervised/co-supervised 5 PhD students and has taught more than 10 courses in University of Houston. Also, he has established High Voltage Engineering lab and Real-time Power System Protection Simulation lab and an online master program in power systems (IPS Program) in the ECE department at University of Houston. He has chaired/co-chaired more than 4 sessions in IEEE conferences. He has more than 10 years of experience in industry, academics and research. His research interests include developing mathematical model and algorithms for wide area monitoring and main protection to improve system integrity protection schemes.

Entergy is one of the largest transmission owners and operators in the United States with over 15,000 miles of transmission facilities. Mark McCulla is the Vice President of Transmission Operations and is responsible for the safe and reliable operation of the Entergy electric transmission system. Mr. McCulla will provide an overview of the Entergy transmission system and its role within the Eastern Interconnect as one of the three North American interconnections. He will also explain how Entergy models the transmission system and performs contingency analysis in preparation for unplanned disturbances. Lastly, he will then provide an overview of a specific outage coordination study performed in the New Orleans area.

Mark McCulla was named vice president of transmission operations in January 2014. Immediately prior to being named to this position, he served more than five years as vice president of transmission regulatory compliance. The vice president of transmission operations provides strategic and executive leadership to transmission operations management and support staff to ensure the safe and reliable operation of the electric transmission system. McCulla is responsible for ensuring employee conformance with established policies, procedures and standards and proper training of operations staff. He also represents the transmission operations business function in a variety of internal and external steering committees and leadership teams. McCulla has more than 30 years of electric utility experience, primarily in transmission operations, planning, compliance and regulatory. Previous Entergy work assignments include transmission regulatory compliance, support services in utility operations, distribution utility operations and transmission operational planning. Prior to Entergy, McCulla worked for the Southwest Power Pool in Little Rock, Arkansas; Cajun Electric Power Cooperative in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Houston Lighting and Power in Texas. He has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Louisiana State University and a master's degree in business administration from Tulane University. He's a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. and is a registered professional engineer in Texas.

The objective of this presentation is to present information about Wisconsin Electric Machines and Power Electronics Consortium at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and electric machine research in novel flux-switching permanent magnet (FSPM) machines. Permanent magnet electric machines are an energy-efficient substitute for electric motors. They offer applications in appliances, industrial, automotive, aerospace, oil and gas, and medical equipment. The FSPM machines have permanent magnets in the stator, and the rotor is similar to that of a switched reluctance machine. The FSPM machines have the benefits of robust rotor and having permanent magnet in the stator, which give opportunities in high-speed applications. This presentation demonstrates two novel FSPM machines developed by Dr. Sarlioglu's research team. The first machine is a low-pole dual-stator six-slot-four-pole (6/4) configuration proposed to reduce the fundamental frequency and high-frequency losses. The proposed dual-stator 6/4 FSPM machine is also compared to the conventional 6/4 FSPM machine to demonstrate reduction of harmonics distortion and cogging torque. The second machine is designed to integrate fluid dynamics into the electric machine. The rotor of the FSPM machine is shaped as airfoils to perform axial-flow compression. The proposed machine makes the axial-flow compressor electric machine system more compact and energy efficient. This research is funded by NSF CAREER Award.

Bulent Sarlioglu is an assistant professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Associate Director, Wisconsin Electric Machines and Power Electronics Consortium (WEMPEC). Dr. Sarlioglu spent more than ten years at Honeywell International Inc.'s aerospace division, most recently as a staff systems engineer, earning Honeywell's technical achievement award in 2003 and an outstanding engineer award in 2011. Dr. Sarlioglu contributed to multiple programs where high-speed electric machines and drives are used mainly for aerospace applications. One of the examples was a turbo-compressor system where the turbine, compressor, and PM motor are mounted on the same shaft. The compressor and turbine are used as part of an air supply system for a Department of Energy 80-kW fuel cell system. The motor was variable speeds up to 100,000 rpm and power up to 17 kW. Dr. Sarlioglu is the inventor or co-inventor of sixteen US patents and many other international patents. His research areas are high-speed electric machines, novel electric machines, and application of wide bandgap devices to power electronics to increase efficiency and power density. Dr. Sarlioglu was a recipient of the Honeywell's Outstanding Engineer Award in 2011. He received the NSF CAREER Award in 2016.

In this talk, we will present some recent results on solving large-scale power system operational problems including optimal power flow, unit commitment, and their uncertain counterparts motivated by renewable integration. We will discuss strong convexification techniques and stochastic sampling algorithms that significantly outperform existing methods in both accuracy and the scale of the problems.

Dr. Andy Sun is an assistant professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Sun is a senior member of IEEE. He has developed one of the first robust optimization models and algorithms for the unit commitment problem in collaboration with the ISO New England. Recently, Dr. Sun has worked on various computational and modeling aspects of the optimal power flow (OPF) problem, and developed one of the strongest convex relaxations for OPF, and new formulations for transmission switching problems. Dr. Sun received B.E. in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing, and PhD in Operations Research from MIT.

Energy sustainability is arguably one of the most critical challenges for a sustainable future. With predictions showing future scarcity and/or higher degree of extraction difficulty of traditional sources of energy for example coal, oil and natural gas, the shift to sustainable clean sources of energy is a must. Another key reason is the increasing detrimental impact of using fossil fuels. Over the last few decades, there has been serious effort to replace mechanical and hydraulic systems with electrical systems. This effort also includes replacing fixed-speed and old electrical drives with higher performance variable-speed drives. This is mainly due to the higher reliability, efficiency and robustness of electrical systems. This trend of “more electric” systems could be seen across a wide range of applications. These include traction, aerospace, actuation, mining, oil & gas, and industrial applications as examples. This push for electrification posed a lot of challenges to develop electrical systems that meet the demanding requirements of the various applications including harsh environments, high power density, high efficiency and fault tolerance in safety-critical applications. At the heart of the electrification effort is the development of advanced electrical machines and drives. This presentation will provide an overview of the various applications where electrification is taking place. The presentation will focus on electrical machines and drives that have been developed or are currently under development. The presentation will also cover some general trends in electrical machines and potential areas of research.

Ayman M. El-Refaie received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin Madison on 2002, and 2005 respectively. Between 2005 and 2016, he has been a principal engineer and a project leader at the Electrical Machines and Drives Lab at General Electric Global Research Center. Since January 2017, he joined Marquette University as the Thomas and Suzanne M. Werner Endowed Chair in sustainable and secure energy. His interests include electrical machines and drives. He has 40 journal and 60 conference publications, with several others pending. He has 31 issued US patents and 28 US patent applications, with several others pending. At GE, he worked on several projects that involve the development of advanced electrical machines for various applications including, aerospace, traction, wind, and water desalination. He was the program manager and principal investigator of a $5.6M DOE-funded project to develop next generation traction motors for hybrid vehicles. He is currently the program manager and principal investigator of a $12M DOE-funded project to develop next generation traction motors for hybrid vehicles that do not include rare earth materials. He received several management awards at GE including the prestigious 2011 Albert W Hull Award, the highest individual award for early career researchers. Also he received “The 2009 Forward Under 40” from the Wisconsin Alumni Association awarded to outstanding University of Wisconsin alumni under the age of 40 and the IEEE Industry Applications Society (IAS) “2009 Andrew W Smith Outstanding Young Member Award”. He was the chair for the IEEE IAS Transportation Systems committee and an associate editor for the Electric Machines committee. He was a technical program chair for the IEEE 2011 Energy Conversion Conference and Exposition (ECCE). He was the general chair for ECCE 2014 and 2015 ECCE steering committee chair. He is a member-at-large in the IEEE Industry Applications Society ececutive board.He is an IEEE Fellow and a member of Sigma Xi since 2006. He is a member of the electrical machines and industrial drives committees. He is a reviewer of 6 IEEE Transactions as well as several other international journals and conferences. He is the recipient of two paper awards.

Functional luminescent nanoparticles are promising materials for in vitro and in vivo optical imaging and therapy due to their unique optical and chemical properties. In this talk, I will present three new types of biocompatible luminescence nanoparticles. The first type of materials is upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs). I will present new developments regarding engineering UCNPs towards deep tissue imaging, photodynamic therapy, optogenetic applications in neuroscience and immunotherapy. The second type of nanoparticles is persistent luminescence nanoparticles (PLNPs). They are bioluminescence-like and possess unprecedented in vivo deep tissue energy rechargeability, outstanding signal-to-noise-ratio with no need for an excitation resource (light) during imaging, and they can be directly detected with existing imaging systems. These nanoparticles continue to emit light for minutes or hours and, in some cases, days, after turning off the excitation source. These long-lasting, light-emitting nanocrystals can provide noninvasive imaging technology for evaluating structural and functional biological processes in living animals and patients. The third is a type of organic Bodipy nanoparticles that were tailored with outstanding NIR absorbing ability. Rather than the conventional laser light needed in PDT, I will present their ultralow power lamp operable PDT applications in deep tissue tumor treatment. Finally, I would like also to introduce a nanobug concept towards cancer treatment.

Dr. Gang Han is currently an Associate Professor at University of Massachusetts Medical School. He received his B.Sc. and M.S. degrees from Nanjing University, and his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He was a postdoctoral scholar at the Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He has authored in over 60 papers in Journals such as Nature, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Communications, Elife, PNAS, JACS, Advanced Materials, Angewandte chemie, Nano lettersSmall, ACS Nano, which have cited over 6900 times, h-index 34. He was honoured awards such as the Worcester Foundation Mel Cutler Award, NIH Exceptional Unconventional Research Enabling Knowledge Acceleration (EUREKA) Award and Human Frontier Science Program Young Investigator Award. His current research focuses on the development of biocompatible functional luminescent nanoparticles and molecules for optical imaging and therapy.