Wencong Su
University of Michigan-Dearborn, MI·Engineering
Power grids were built around large power plants whose heavy spinning generators naturally resist sudden changes in frequency. That built-in steadiness is called inertia.
- Fields
Engineering
Computer Science
- Topics
power grid
power systems
grid reliability
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Build a fundamental understanding of the practical challenges facing low-inertia power grids with high penetration of grid-forming inverter-based energy resources, which set grid voltage and frequency themselves.
- Design a holistic assessment framework and visualization tool that captures the cause-and-effect links between diverse grid-forming inverter resources and their combined impact on power system reliability.
- Develop a self-adaptive, robust, stability-aware grid-forming controller that learns power grid behavior so distributed energy resources respond better to grid changes.
- Validate the stability-aware controllers on existing power system testbeds and open these testbeds as a shared resource for research and education groups in Southeast Michigan.
More about the research
As more electricity comes from distributed energy resources (DERs) such as solar panels and batteries, the grid is losing that steadiness. These smaller sources connect through inverters, electronics that convert their power for the grid, and they behave differently from traditional plants. The resulting low-inertia grids can be harder to keep reliable and stable when conditions are uncertain. This project asks how to keep the grid stable as these resources multiply, and how to turn the answers into tools that utilities and industry can use.
Why it matters
As utilities add solar, batteries and other distributed energy resources, the power grid risks becoming less stable and more prone to disruptions. Better reliability assessment tools and stability-aware inverter controllers could help grid operators run grids with a high share of these resources while keeping power dependable. A shared testbed would also give smaller research and education groups in Southeast Michigan a place to test their ideas.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Dominic Gross
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Engineering·Early-career
Develop a control design and stability analysis framework for grid-forming inverters that explicitly accounts for the static and dynamic limits of power electronics and renewable generation in zero-carbon power systems.
Javad Khazaei
Lehigh University, PA·Engineering·Early-career
Learn low-dimensional manifolds from time-series measurements of distributed energy resources and use them for real-time predictive control of voltage, frequency and power sharing in microgrids.
Mingxi Liu
University of Utah, UT·Engineering·Early-career
Develop optimization, machine learning and statistical tools for a grid-edge resource control framework that scales with device population and network size and works across different device types and grid services.
The school
University of Michigan-Dearborn: 3 labs on PI Pages, $12M a year on research, 20 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.