Paul Ohodnicki will lead a Pitt team supporting a new ARPA-E grant

The University of Pittsburgh is working with longtime-partner North Carolina State University on a newly selected project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) and aimed at expanding the capacity and reliability of the power grid.

Paul Ohodnicki, associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science in the Swanson School of Engineering, will lead Pitt’s portion of the project, which is focused on designing, modeling and manufacturing transformers for a high-voltage DC power grid.

The project, Disruptive DC Converters for Grid Resilient Infrastructure to Deliver Secure Energy, (DC-GRIDS), will be led by North Carolina State’s Subhashish Bhattacharya, Duke Energy Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“We are excited to support the North Carolina State University team by designing and developing next generation medium frequency magnetics for high-voltage grid applications,” said Ohodnicki, who was recently named the permanent director of the Center for Energy.

North Carolina State will use the $1.9 million grant to develop a versatile high-voltage direct current (HVDC) converter station using its own semiconductor switch design. The project aims to reduce the cost, footprint and volume of today’s state-of-the-art converter station by at least threefold. 

Of the total grant, about $600,000 in federal funds will be allocated to Pitt to support the initiative with designs and prototypes of medium frequency transformer technology.

Ohodnicki is the faculty Pitt director of the Advanced Magnetics for Power and Energy Development (AMPED), which he co-directs with Brandon Grainger, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Swanson, who is also collaborating on the project. Bhattacharya is AMPED’s faculty lead at North Carolina State. 

The consortium is building upon an established ecosystem and educational agenda with universities, industries and the national lab community to advance soft magnetic materials and their applications in electric power conversion systems.

“This project is an excellent example of the long-standing partnership between University of Pittsburgh and North Carolina State University through AMPED,” Ohodnicki said. “This impactful consortium drives student education by hands-on research to deliver real-world impacts.”