Dr. Alex Q. Huang of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University has been named Alcoa Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, effective October
2004.

Huang joined the NC State faculty in 2004. His research interests include power electronics and power systems. He received his doctorate in electrical engineering from Cambridge University in Great Britain in 1992.

A SPEC paper entitled"Built-in current sensor and over-current protection of an emitter turn-off Thyristor" authored by Bin Zhang and Alex Huang et. al received the above award.

The 2004 CAPES (Consortium for Advanced Power Electronics and Energy Storage) review meeting was held on Dec 1-2, 2004 at North Carolina State University (NCSU). The meeting was hosted by Semiconductor Power Electronics Center (SPEC) directed by Prof. Alex Huang.

The review meeting was a great success. The meeting was attended by twenty one (21) external visitors from utilities, government and vendors. Utilities were represented by EPRI, AEP and TVA. Vendor representatives from ABB, Siemens and Areva attended the meeting. Government representatives from DOE attended the meeting. Research teams from NCSU, University of Missouri-Rolla, Virginia Tech , EPRI-PEAC made twelve detailed presentations on their research work on advanced power electronic and energy storage system during the one and half day review meetings. Major progress of the emitter turn-off (ETO) thyristor and ETO based converter systems were reported. Very lively discussions were made on the manufacturing issue, vendor acceptance issue and power density issue.

The participant also had a chance to visit the new SPEC research lab. The lab tour is a great success because the visitors had a chance to interact with a lot of students. The students organized the lab area with a lot of informative posters. The visitors were impressed with the spacious lab and the high power capability the lab currently has in power electronics research.

For a copy of the meeting agenda, click here

ETO Wins Prestigious R&D 100 Award (8/2003)