IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2016 - 29
Thinking Outside the Box
Students meet Google's
Little Box Challenge
r
Rachael Born and Xiaonan Zhao, two
students from the Virginia Tech Future
Energy Electronics Center (FEEC), know
what it's like to be the only two women
among all the other entrants waiting
for the announcement of the winners of
a US$1 million prize. The FEEC's eightperson team was a finalist in the Little
Box Challenge, a worldwide Google- and
IEEE-sponsored competition to reduce
the size of inverters by using widebandgap devices and other techniques
to achieve a high power density. Of the
several hundred papers submitted, 18
were invited to submit hardware for testing. Prototypes were constantly run for
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MWIE.2016.2603590
Date of publication: 9 November 2016
several months at National Renewable
Energy Laboratory (NREL) and subjected
to 100 h of testing.
At the ARPA-E 2016 conference
in October 2015, the results were
announced. Only three inverters survived, passing the stringent requirements. One was from the Virginia Tech
team. "The team that came in first was
a Belgian company called CE+T that
specializes in power electronics and
Schneider Electric, a billion-dollar
French-based company, placed second,"
explains Born. "My team and I placed
third. As a small team of grad students,
we felt honored to be among their ranks,
and as the only women, we would like to
highlight the need for more diversity in
electrical engineering."
"The winning design was half the size
as ours, which is amazing," says Zhao.
"We made many design tradeoffs. Density was only one of them. We focused on
reliability, which we think is most important and why we passed the testing."
A Look at the Team
Virginia Tech's team included three
graduate students and four off-site professionals. Its advisor was Dr. Jih-Sheng
Lai, the director of Virginia Tech's FEEC,
which is known for power electronics
and inverters. The team lead was Lanhua Zhang, a graduate research assistant and Ph.D. student in his final year
of study at FEEC. He was in charge of
the inverter, digital signal processing,
and other control systems.
Xiaonan Zhao, one of the two female
graduate students on the team, began
her graduate studies at New York University, where she worked as a graduate
research assistant in the Power Electronics Lab. She finished her master's
degree at the FEEC and developed an
interest in renewable energy applications. She is currently pursuing her
Ph.D. degree.
On the team, Zhao was in charge of
a dc/dc stage that reached 99.6% efficiency and was crucial in helping meet
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