CEAS’ Fang Luo wins ARPA-E Grant from US Department of Energy

Fang Luo

Fang Luo, Empire Innovation Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, was recently awarded a $779,230grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to continue his high voltage semiconductor packaging research.

His work is part of a $3.5 million award to a team led by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The project aims to continue work to develop a device that allows for more resilient and efficient power transmission. It is part of a much larger and ongoing national effort to update and protect the country's outdated and dangerously inefficient power grid.

"It is exciting to see Professor Luo's work play such a vital role in protecting our nation's power grid," said Andy Singer, dean of the Stony Brook College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "We are extremely proud to have Professor Lou as a member of the college."

Luo's contribution to the UIUC project will be to help develop and refine a diamond-based package to protect the device, called a switcher. The switchers are used to direct where and how power flows across semiconductors and through the power lines that power society. Diamonds, which if lab grown are affordable and accessible, are more efficient and reliable than conventional materials.

"My lab doesn't make the semiconductors; we put them together so others can use them," said Luo, who is also director of the Spellman High Voltage Laboratory."Different packaging results in different levels of performance. The performance metrics for this device we've been developing is way better than what's out there right now."

"If I lose power at my house for a few minutes it's not a big deal - so my kids can't access wifi for a few minutes," he said. "But in critical industries, they can't lose power. If certain manufacturing sectors lose power, it can cost them millions of dollars an hour. This is something we're trying to avoid and this is the technology you can use to protect ourselves."

The device the team is building, if successful and commercialized, aims to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes for power moving in one direction to be redirected to an area of higher need. Such a device would have eliminated, or reduced, the days-long outages and hundreds of deaths from Winter Storm Uri in Texas, for example.

Nationwide, power disruptions cost the U.S. economy more than $150 billion a year.

This is the kind of work we need to do to protect this nation," Fang said. "We need full, automated control of our power grid. Across long distances, say if I want to move power from New York to California, I don't have any automatic mechanism that can do that. To do that now, we have to make phone calls or send emails, and ask people to manually switch these switches."

The $3.5 million projectis one of 15 projects awarded by the Department of Energy's Unlocking Lasting Transformative Resiliency Advances by Faster Actuation of Power Semiconductor Technologies (ULTRAFAST) program. A total of $42 million was awarded across the 15 projects.

This is one of more than a dozen funded research projects Luo is leading. Some of his other projects include helping to optimize electric aircraft, funded by General Electric; exploring alternative computer power sources, funded by IBM; and work on microgrids, a localized power generation and distribution system that can be integrated or act independently of a larger system, funded by the Air Force.

Luo is a senior member of IEEE, and a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He is a past recipient of the NSF's CAREER Award, the foundation's most prestigious award for early-career researchers.

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