Awards Announcement for IFEC 2022

Awards Announcement for IFEC 2022

Kevin Bai, Daniel Costinett, Helen Cui

The IEEE International Future Energy Challenge (IFEC) 2022 was successfully held at the NSF&DOE Engineering Research Center CURENT in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville on July 27-29! IFEC is the largest international student competition in power electronics for innovation, conservation, and effective use of electrical energy, sponsored by PELS, IAS, PSMA and PES. Eight teams with more than 50 participants worldwide attended the final competition to demonstrate 1kVA grid services from their solar microgrid inverters to the Hardware Testbed (HTB) - a power electronic converter based Grid Emulator at CURENT. After two days of intensive debugging and testing, the following teams are congratulated with the awards:

·         The Grand Prize Award: Utah State University

·         The Best Innovation Award: University of Belgrade (H-Bridges)

·         The Best Engineering Design Award: Reutlingen University

·         The Best Presentation Award: Leibniz University, Hannover

·         The Best Team Work Award: University of Maryland

·         The Best Educational Impact Award: University of Connecticut

·         The Best Participant Award: University of Moratuwa

The IFEC 2022 leveraged the HTB facility at CURENT that provided great opportunities for the participants to gain experience with high-fidelity power grid connection. The primary goal of IFEC is to provide early exposure to power electronics for undergraduate students attaining crucial technical skills in power electronics through hands-on experiments. The IFEC 2023 will be held at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany, on developing a single-phase solid-state transformer. For more details, please check http://energychallenge.weebly.com/ifec-2023.html.