Maryam Saeedifard and Pengcheng Zhang have received a 2021 IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics (TPEL) First Place Prize Paper Award for their paper “A Field Enhancement Integration Design Featuring Misalignment Tolerance for Wireless EV Charging Using LCL Topology.” TPEL is one of the most impactful journals in the field of power electronics.
Saeedifard is a professor in the Georgia Tech School for Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Zhang is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Tsinghua University in Beijing and carried this work under Saeedifard’s supervision when he was a visiting researcher in ECE from November 2017 to December 2019. Co-authors of the paper include Omer C. Onar, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Qingxin Yang, Tianjin University of Technology; and Changsong Cai, Wuhan University.
The paper proposes a magnetic integration design for electric vehicle (EV) wireless power transfer (WPT) systems. WPT is an emerging technology that can generate electric power transmission over distances without physical contact, offering significant benefits to EVs, as well as consumer electronics, automation systems, and more. The team’s magnetic integration design for EV WPT systems features overlapping compensation and transmitting coils that share the ferrite layer — which is used to control electromagnetic interference — without any decoupling consideration. The magnetic field generated by both the compensation and transmitting coils are exploited to transfer power.
The first-place distinction is a high honor and a tribute to the fine research quality, presentation, and potential impact that the research has to the field, according to TPEL. The publication’s rigorous selection process requires multiple review levels and votes. Each year, four first prize papers and six second prize papers are deemed best among those published in the preceding calendar year. In 2021, 1,233 regular papers, letters, and correspondence were published from 2,718 original submissions.
Saeedifard is a leading expert on power electronics for energy conversion systems. She has been an ECE faculty member since 2014 and holds a Dean’s Professorship from Tech’s College of Engineering. In January 2022, she was named an IEEE Fellow and was recently named a recipient of Nagamori Foundation Awards.
Zhang received a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, China, in 2021, and was a visiting researcher at Georgia Tech for two years. His research interests include engineering electromagnetism, wireless power transfer, and wireless power industrial applications.
The award-winning research team will be honored by the TPEL Editorial Board during the IEEE Energy Conversion Congress & Expo in Detroit, Michigan on October 9-13, 2022.