A keynote for the ICRERA 2019 Conference, which was held on Nov 3-6 in Brasov, RO, was delivered by Dr. Dan M. Ionel, SPARK and PEIK Director, ECE Professor and L. Stanley Pigman Chair in Power. Recent editions of ICRERA were held in Birmingham, UK, in 2016, were Dr. Ionel also served as a keynote speaker, in San Diego, CA, in 2017, and in Paris, FR, last year. Next year’s ICRERA will be held in Glasgow, UK https://www.icrera.org/. Dr. Ionel’s keynote for this edition was entitled “Recent Technology Developments for Utility-Scale and Distributed Battery Energy Storage Systems."
One of SPARK group’s papers from UK and PEIK: “Overview of Flywheel Systems for Renewable Energy Storage with a Design Study for High-speed Axial-flux Permanent-magnet Machines" with contributions by EE Ph.D. students Murat Kesgin and Narges Taran and postdoctoral scholar Dr. Peng Han, won a best paper/poster award. Two other SPARK papers with contributions by EE Ph.D. students Evan Jones and Huangjie Gong and EE USP Ph.D. student Rosemary Alden, covered topics of net zero energy microgrids and communities, and smart plugs and circuit breakers for buildings, respectively. The PDFs for the keynote and for the papers are available on the SPARK website http://sparklab.engr.uky.edu/.