Shuhui Li
University of Alabama, AL·Engineering
Wind farms, solar panels and other renewable sources connect to the power grid through electronics. These connections can become unstable, and such failures have caused large outages and halted energy production.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Computer Science
- Topics
offshore wind
wind turbines
rare-earth-free magnets
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Develop permanent magnets for offshore wind turbines that do not rely on rare-earth materials, which reduces supply chain limits.
- Design an AI-driven control system at the megawatt scale that prevents unstable operation of permanent magnet synchronous generator wind turbines in offshore applications.
- Build temporal and spatial wind models to manage distributed offshore wind farms over large regions and improve their integration with the onshore grid.
- Establish a per-unit, time-angular domain testing method so low-power lab systems can emulate high-voltage hybrid AC/DC networks that link offshore wind with the grid.
- Extend neural-network inverter control to grid-following and grid-forming operation for renewable resources that are grid-tied, islanded or standalone.
- Build AI-driven inverter prototypes that meet strict electric power industry reliability standards and test their commercial potential with industry partners.
More about the research
Offshore wind adds further problems: turbine magnets that rely on imported rare-earth metals, and the need to join offshore lines, which carry direct current (DC), to onshore grids, which run on alternating current (AC). The lab's two projects use artificial intelligence (AI) control and new hardware designs to make renewable power more reliable, from single devices up to whole grids.
Why it matters
More stable control of inverters and wind turbines could reduce outages caused by renewable energy connections and allow more renewable power to reach homes and businesses. Rare-earth-free magnets could reduce U.S. dependence on foreign suppliers for offshore wind turbines. Better wind forecasting and hybrid AC/DC grid testing could help utilities plan offshore wind integration.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
RAISE: CET: Rare-Earth-Free Magnet and AI-Driven Control for Power Generation, transmission, and Grid Integration of Offshore Wind
NSF · Aug 2024 – Jul 2028
PFI-RP: Development of Novel Inverter Technologies and Prototypes for Enhanced Power Generation from Renewable Energy Resources
NSF · Apr 2022 – Mar 2027
Closest labs
Wencong Su
University of Michigan-Dearborn, MI·Engineering
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.
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.
The school
University of Alabama: 22 labs on PI Pages, $221M a year on research, 235 research doctorates a year.
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