Dr. Samir Hazra a former Ph.D. student of Prof. Subhashish Bhattacharya at FREEDM, received first prize in the 2018 IEEE Industry Application Society Chapters and Membership Development (IAS CMD) Student Thesis Contest for his doctoral work entitled, “Power Generation and Energy Storage Integration for Wave Energy Conversion System”. Read the full dissertation here.

IAS CMD arranges the thesis contest to recognize the best emerging academic work within the scope of the IAS. Dr. Hazra presented his work and received the award at the IAS Annual Meeting 2018, held the day before the IEEE ECCE Conference in Portland, Oregon.

Various aspects of power generation from an oscillating ocean wave energy converter (WEC) are studied in this dissertation. A mechanical model of the WEC is derived and an emulating system of a paddle type WEC is developed in the laboratory experimental system by solving the dynamics of the wave energy conversion system (WECS) in real-time. A low-cost power architecture for power generation is proposed. A cost-based design of a hybrid energy storage system is proposed to smooth out the oscillating WEC power before dispatching to the grid. For better round-trip efficiency of the energy storage converters state of the art, SiC power devices have been characterized and converter demonstration is presented. His work was sponsored primarily by NC Coastal Studies Institute and ABB Corporate Research, Raleigh, North Carolina.

A 2015 paper from his work published in IEEE Transaction Power Electronics titled, “High Switching Performance of 1700-V, 50-A SiC Power MOSFET Over Si IGBT/BiMOSFET for Advanced Power Conversion Applications”, received the 2017 IEEE Power Electronics Transactions Second Prize Paper Award. Finally, a paper titled, “Gate Driver Design Considerations for Silicon Carbide MOSFETs Including Series Connected Devices” was awarded the 2017 IEEE PELS TC6 Emerging Technology Best Paper Award, which was also presented at ECCE 2018.