ECE Faculty receive a grant dor development of Rare-Earth-Free magnets

A group of ECE faculty with Dr. Shuhui Li as the PI and Drs. Yang-Ki Hong and Qianzhi Zhang as co-PIs received a National Science Foundation award titled “RAISE: CET: Rare-Earth-Free Magnet and AI-Driven Control for Power Generation, transmission, and Grid Integration of Offshore Wind”.

The main objectives of this project are to advance offshore wind technologies from the level of individual wind turbines to their integration into the system level of an offshore wind farm. The first goal is to develop magnets that do not rely on rare-earth materials. By doing so, the project seeks to reduce the U.S.’s reliance on foreign suppliers for rare-earth materials in offshore wind turbines. The second goal is to design an AI-driven control system at the MW scale that can overcome the unstable operations of individual permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) wind turbines that have been reported in the literature and by the industry in offshore applications. The third goal aims to develop temporal and spatial models that can be used to manage highly distributed offshore wind turbines and wind farms over a large geographic area. These models will improve offshore wind transmission planning and integration of the offshore grid with the onshore main grid. Lastly, the project aims to establish a new testing mechanism using a unique per-unit and time-angular domain transformation. This will enable experimental research and evaluation of high-voltage, high-power hybrid AC-DC networks of the integrated electric power system with offshore wind, based on low-voltage, low-power hybrid AC/DC equivalent systems.