UTK and ORNL will host the 2025 IEEE Workshop on Control and Modeling of Power Electronics (COMPEL) June 22-26, 2025 in Knoxville, TN.  This workshop brings together researchers, engineers and students from academia and industry for an interactive discussion on the latest advances in modeling, simulation, analysis and control of power electronic devices, circuits and systems. Digest submission is now open, and all members of the power electronics community are invited to submit their latest... read more

UTK Professor Daniel Costinett gave the tutorial for the 2024 IEEE Workshop on Control and Modeling of Power Electronics.  The tutorial, titled "Analysis and Design of Switched-Mode Power Converters Using Discrete Time Modeling", covered historical and current developments in discrete time modeling for both small-signal dynamic and large-signal steady-state modeling of power conversion circuits.  A recording of the tutorial is avialable here. Professor Costinett is the General Chair fo... read more

This June, Associate Professor Daniel Costinett was presented the 2022 Richard M. Bass Outstanding Young Power Electronics Engineer Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Power Electronics Society. Awards from the IEEE are among the highest honors bestowed on technical engineers worldwide. Each year, the Richard M. Bass Award honors an early-career engineer who has made outstanding contributions to the field of power electronics. “I... read more

Today we're releasing a public beta of the Switched Mode Power Supply Toolbox for MATLAB.  This toolbox integrates our recent work in applying discrete time state space modeling to the steady-state analysis and design of power electronics.  The toolbox contains a a vsariety of functions and utilities that help speed up the process of analyzing, designing, and optimizing power converters.  The full source code is available (under MiT Open Source License) from the github repositoy, ... read more

PoTenntial Professor Daniel Costinett gave a Power America webinar on March 6th, 2019, covering the fundamentals of wireless power transfer and ongoing research at the University of Tennessee employing GaN transistors in the design of conversion circuits, Abstract For consumer electronics, multi-load wireless power transfer (WPT) represents the ultimate transition away from wired technology; the commercialization of WPT technologies represents a paradigm shift comparable to the development of Wi... read more

Leon Tolbert, Min H. Kao Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the Tickle College of Engineering, has been named winner of the 2020 SEC Faculty Achievement Award for the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the SEC announced on April 15. Tolbert is a registered professional engineer in the state of Tennessee and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1991 and has worked on several projects there... read more

Volkswagen Group of America; the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; the UT Research Foundation; and Oak Ridge National Laboratory today announced a partnership to create Volkswagen’s first innovation hub in North America at the UT Research Park at Cherokee Farm. The partnership is leveraging the expertise of ORNL scientists and several faculty members within the Tickle College of Engineering at UT to develop lighter vehicle components made from composite materials and ... read more

For consumer mobile electronics, wireless power transfer (WPT) promises to revolutionize the way users interact with their devices. Ubiquitous, seamless charging is expected to reduce onboard battery storage requirements, and untether mobile devices from periodic wired charging requirements.  At present, commercial implementations of wireless power transfer are largely limited to low power, low efficiency, and a charging paradigm where each device must be well aligned with a dedicated charg... read more

For Knoxville native Spencer Cochran, staying at UT for graduate school was a given.Cochran began his journey at UT after graduating from Halls High School in 2011. During his undergraduate years, a few things pushed him toward an electrical engineering degree.“I always thought I wanted to work on robotic prosthetics,” Cochran said. “The longer I was in school, the more I began to feel like electrical engineering was just as appropriate, if not more appropriate, for that dream.... read more

Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced Thursday that it had successfully demonstrated a new 20-kilowatt wireless charging system for electric vehicles.The lab said the charging system achieved 90 percent efficiency at three times the rate of the plug-in systems commonly used to recharge electric vehicles."This ability can help accelerate the adoption and convenience of electric vehicles," ORNL said in a release distributed to the news media.The Department of Energy laboratory collaborated on te... read more

Cell phone and laptop chargers, electric cars, medical devices: improvement and development of these and other devices are all done by engineers in power electronics.A new $2.9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy is helping the University of Tennessee encourage more students to go to graduate school in that discipline with a new graduate traineeship.UT faculty members are developing the courses and other details, as well as recruiting students for the program, which is expected to s... read more

Electric vehicles (EVs) have become fixtures in the car market, both in the U.S. and abroad, but there are hurdles to mass consumer adoption. In addition to continuing to be cost prohibitive to many, EV technology is still in need of advancements in efficiency, particularly at typical performance levels.As of December 2014, the United States possesses the largest fleet of plug-in electric vehicles in the world, with 291,332 highway capable plug-in electric cars sold since the launch of the Tesla... read more