The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, hosted the April 2017 Power Optimization for Electro-Thermal Systems Center National Science Foundation site visit. Five UA faculty and 14 UA students attended the meeting.

Doctoral students had an opportunity to present projects to Drs. Jackson and Misawa, NSF program managers, as well as all faculty members in attendance. Jackson and Misawa also attended a 1-day technical conference organized by the University of Illinois students the day before the official site visit. 

The Power Optimization for Electro-Thermal Systems Center is working on a problem of national importance and is making significant progress. They have an excellent team and are starting to grow a solid ecosystem of partner companies. One of the activities featured at the meeting is the growing progress made in educational programs. Shannon Davis, U of A educational manager for the center, successfully completed a Research Experiences for Teacher program last summer with Hellstern Middle School students and has begun work on the summer 2017 RET program to include Hellstern and Farmington High School.

Michael Caruthers, division manager of electronic products at Caterpillar, noticed an increased amount of collaboration among the institutions and among faculty, compared to last year's site visit. "I think you see that in the results the various projects have made in the course of the year," he said.

Chris De Roo, GTIN business development and strategy manager at John Deere, attended this meeting to investigate what further possibilities John Deere has in better integrating the rest of the technology community. "I'm always interested in the site visit team and the questions that they ask. It kind of gives me a little bit of perspective on what the NSF is thinking and what they're after," De Roo said.

Meggitt, a company that supplies power generation and power conversion equipment primarily to aerospace, oil and gas industries, also joined the Power Optimization for Electro-Thermal Systems Center's list of industry partners this year.

"Meggitt is a mid‐size company, so we don't necessarily have a strong basic research branch," said Chief Engineer Andy Gadre. "Collaborating in forums such as POETS allows us to have that ability to get into the basic research, and see how it leverages into our products and technologies that we are developing."

Meggitt was originally drawn to the center's testbeds upon joining, but after attending the site visit sessions, Gadre said there may be more opportunities for collaboration in other areas as well, such as thermal management.

The Power Optimization for Electro-Thermal Systems Center is a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center. At this center, engineering faculty from the University of Arkansas, Universtiy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Howard University, and Stanford University collaborate with members of industry to identify and carry out research projects to improve the power density of next generation electro-thermal systems that are the most relevant to industry needs.

For more information on the center, contact Alan Mantooth, deputy director, at mantooth@uark.edu.