A great achievement for the members of the Wind Empowerment Technology Working Group!
The SPEARHEAD Transnational Access organized in May by Luiz Lavado Villa and his laboratory, LAAS-CNRS, along with members of the Technology WG, Jean Alinei, Nasos Vasilakis, Ronan Blanchard and Rafael Oliva, has been announced as Success Story within the H2020 ERIGrid project.
Transnational Accesses (TA) are mobility programs organized within ERIGrid, giving participants access to a Pan-European research infrastructure to test their smart grid and Distributed Energy Resources concepts. SPEARHEAD TA in particular, focused on the development of modular power electronics for multi-tier rural electrification. Luiz and his team travelled to Athens and used the facilities of the ICCS-NTUA laboratory to test two pilot elementary power modules in controlled conditions and validate their hardware, firmware and software design.
The technical report from this TA project is accessible here.
“The SPEARHEAD TA marked a turning point in our research regarding modular power electronics”, says Luiz. “Since then it has fueled 5 different internships and allowed us at the LAAS-CNRS to structure a PhD thesis on the field of statistical learning for modular power electronics applied to rural electrification. The software we validated during this TA also allowed us to get the second place at the TAPAS challenge organised by Siemens. It took us little over 3 days of work to adapt it to a new power electronics board, giving us a case study of the portability of our solution accord different power electronics hardware platforms. Finally, a revised and corrected version of the hardware, firmware and software of our power module is now available online and our impact in rural electrification keeps growing as we collaborate further with colleagues in emerging countries to transfer the OwnTech technology to them.”‘
This is the second time that work done within a Wind Empowerment working group receives the ERIGrid TA Success Story title (the first time coming from the Measurements WG), among around a hundred of TAs that have happened during the last 3 years.
