Electrical Engineering Research Team Wins Best Paper Award

Karin Alvarado

Yuqi Wei

A team of electrical engineering researchers earned the "Second Place Prize Paper" award from an international journal for their work on review of modulation strategies for LLC resonant converter, where the modulation strategy generation mechanisms are revealed.  This work enables high efficiency operation of power converters in numerous applications, like renewable energy systems, electric vehicles, and portable electronics. At the same time, more power-dense converters can be achieved.

Yuqi Wei, doctoral student in electrical engineering; Quanming Luo, professor of electrical engineering from Chongqing University; and Alan Mantooth, distinguished professor of electrical engineering and Twenty-First Century Research Leadership Chair in Engineering, received a "Second Place Prize Paper Award" from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Power Electronics journal for 2020.

The paper, titled "Overview of Modulation Strategies for LLC Resonant Converter," was a result of Wei's doctoral work under Mantooth's direction. The technical focus of the paper is on the generation mechanisms of modulation strategies for resonant converter, which can also be applied for other converters. Comprehensive comparisons are made among different modulation strategies to provide guidance for engineers when analyzing and designing resonant converters. The technical challenges, like wide voltage gain range applications, interleaving operations, and multiple-output operations, can be resolved from the modulation strategy viewpoint.

The selection of the paper is a high honor and a tribute to the fine research quality, presentation, and potential impact that the research has to the field. The selection process was rigorous and went through multiple review levels and votes before the paper was selected for an award. The paper was selected from more than 1,100 pieces published in the journal in 2020

Mantooth manages the UA Power Group, a multidisciplinary group of researchers working to deliver next-generation electronic vehicles, renewable energy systems, grid infrastructure, and cybersecurity.

Transactions on Power Electronics was named the top power engineering journal in 2019 by Google Scholar and is perennially among the most highly ranked journals in all of IEEE.