IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - December 2014 - 42

Member News

Eunice Ribeiro Wins 2014
Joseph J. Suozzi Fellowship
in Power Electronics

very year since 2001, the Joseph
J. Suozzi Fellowship Award,
sponsored by the IEEE International Telecommunications Energy
Conference (INTELEC) executive
committee and given in honor of the
late Joseph John Suozzi, has been presented to an electrical engineering
graduate student whose proposed
project is expected to make a significant difference in powering communications systems such as wireline and
wireless systems, data/Internet systems, video systems, satellite communications, and other similar equipment. However, the winners so far
have all been male electrical engineering graduate students.
Last year, it was Ankan De of
North Carolina State University, and
the 2012 fellowship went to Hamid
Behjati of the Univeristy of Texas at
Arlington. The complete list of winners is in [1]. But the 2014 winner has
made history. For the first time since
its commencement, the Joseph J.
Suozzi Fellowship has been awarded
to a female doctoral candidate from
the University of Coimbra in Portugal. Her name is Eunice Ribeiro, and
her research interests include electronic power converters, renewable
energies, and energy systems.
Based on her doctoral thesis, Ribeiro's entry for this competition was
"Fault Diagnosis in Energy Systems

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPEL.2014.2361445
Date of publication: 18 December 2014

IEEE POWER ELECTRONICS MAGAZINE

Eunice Ribeiro.

for Telecommunications." The main
goal of her project is to develop faultdiagnostic methods for the power interfaces applied to telecommunications
power supplies based on renewable energies and energy-storage device technologies. Because the proposed faultdiagnosis method is easy to implement,
Ribeiro believes that self-diagnosing
power converters incorporating this
methodology will ease the introduction
of fault-tolerant control strategies in
the telecom power supplies.
Ribeiro's essay identified nonisolated dc-dc converters as key powerconversion interfaces between small
and medium wind and photovoltaic
(PV) power-conversion systems and
the dc telecommunication power supplies because they optimize the energy
generation from renewable sources. In
essence, four different dc-dc converters were selected for interfacing PV-

 December 2014

battery and wind-battery power systems, i.e., unidirectional single-ended
dc-dc converters, three-phase interleaved dc-dc converters, three-level
boost dc-dc converters, and bidirectional half-bridge dc-dc converters.
The dc-dc converters are comprehensively studied both under normal
healthy operation and fault conditions
such as the power switch open circuit.
According to Ribeiro, both the analyses
are the basis for optimizing the converter operation, improving the converter
design, developing simulation models,
preventing damages, predicting malfunctions, building fault-protection
devices, developing fault-diagnostic
methods, and applying fault-tolerant
strategies. "A power switch fault might
not result in the stoppage of equipment
operation, but, when not diagnosed in
time, its consequences can be far more
devastating and can result in high repair costs or even complete replacement," says Ribeiro. Therefore, she
adds, "the study of such faults is very
important for preventing their potential
destructive consequences."
As per Ribeiro's essay for this
competition, the fault analysis has
provided enough data for her to develop four novel fault-diagnostic
techniques for the above-mentioned
dc-dc converter topologies. Also,
these fault-diagnostic techniques use
only control variables and do not require extra sensors, which increase
cost and complexity and concurrently decrease the converter reliability,

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - December 2014