Mission

The mission of the Connecticut for Power Electronics Excellence (CONPEX) is to maintain and expand excellence in research and workforce development in the broad area of power electronics and its technology domains and applications, with a holistic interdisciplinary approach, to support existing and future industry, government, research, and training activities in this area.

Our Goals & Objectives

  1. Establishing a world-renowned center in power electronics to address global energy challenges and energy equity in remote and under-served areas.
  2. Establishing short courses for advanced engineering education both locally, nationally, and globally.
  3. Creating a workforce training program in an area of state and national needs.
  4. Establishing a truly unique inter-disciplinary approach to address local and global energy challenges that require power electronic energy conversion.
  5. Establish a R&D platform to enable inter-disciplinary expertise to address advance power electronic solutions to address upcoming challenges with industry as partner.

Additional Objectives

Power electronics is a research area overlapping engineering and the sciences in which many disciplines interact to address high-efficiency electrical energy conversion. These disciplines include but are not limited to semiconductor materials and devices, control and estimation, intelligent diagnostics and prognostics, thermal management and packaging, power systems, analog and mixed circuits, digital signal processing, electromagnetics, and high-performance material. Power electronic converters are critical in transportation electrification systems, renewable energy systems, microgrids, utility grids, electromechanical and electrochemical energy conversion systems, and are critical to automation, manufacturing, defense, and many other areas.

Anywhere that an electric machine, a renewable energy source, a data server, a laser, or any other technologies are found, there is likely a power converter supplying it with regulated and reliable electrical energy. Addressing research challenges in this area is critical for the state of Connecticut and the nation to ensure global technological superiority that can only be achieved through interdisciplinary cutting-edge research and workforce development, for which the University of Connecticut (UConn) College of Engineering is uniquely posed.

The objective of CONPEX is to create an industry consortium and provide industrial partners such as Connecticut state agencies and institutions, as well as federal agencies and institutions with human talent and research capabilities that provide economic and resilient clean electrical energy. The application would span throughout defense and commercial needs including transportation, by addressing all aspects of technology development from material research to system integration advancing power electronics. This will be achieved through cutting-edge research that addresses challenges in the design, operation, demonstration, implementation, and fault-tolerance of power electronic systems, adopting a research-to-market strategy to address new technology needs, e.g. advanced high power-high temperature electronics, aerospace electronics, autonomous vehicles, electrical propulsion engine, and green hydrogen generation.