Yuanrui Sang, a second-year Ph.D. student in the University of Utah’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, received the best paper award at the 2017 North American Power Symposium (NAPS) in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Sang won the award for her paper, “The Link Between Power Flow Control Technologies: Topology Control and FACTS.” Her advisor, U electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Mostafa Ardakani, is a co-author on the paper.
NAPS highlights the work of graduate students whose research focuses on power and energy systems. Sang’s’s paper investigates the interdependence between two power flow control technologies: transmission switching and impedance control. She shows that independent operation of each technology can lead to inefficiencies, which can be avoided through a systematic co-optimization. This issue becomes more important as the operators begin to utilize power flow control technologies more frequently. An extended version of her paper, titled “The Interdependence between Transmission Switching and Variable-Impedance Series FACTS Devices” has been recently published in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems.
This award reflects the quality of research in the University of Utah’s power program and its recognition by the power and energy research community.