Sanaz Paran received the Best Poster Award from the College of Engineering at the Sixth Annual Georgia Tech Postdoctoral Research Symposium, held on September 19, 2019. 

Paran is a postdoctoral fellow in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). She works in the Center for Distributed Energy (CDE), where she is advised by Deepak Divan who is the John E. Pippin Chair Professor in ECE and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. Paran’s coauthors on the poster are Divan and Rohit Jinsiwale, an ECE Ph.D. student who also works in CDE.

The title of Paran’s award-winning poster is “Designing a Simulation Platform to Analyze the Interaction of Multiple Autonomous Converters with the Grid and Each Other.” The future grid will consist of a number of power electronic converters connected to the grid. The converters are being designed to be autonomous, making control decisions based on local parameters. The behavior of these autonomous, self-learning controllers needs to be analyzed to ensure stable operation of the grid under steady state and all possible transients. With the new-age converters programmed to autonomously respond to grid-events at a faster rate, traditional co-simulation tools may not be sufficient. 

Paran and her CDE collaborators aim to develop a platform where both the power system and power electronic elements can be co-simulated in detail to analyze the interactions between multiple converters and the grid. The project proposes a platform for designing a large distribution network with the penetration of PV and converters. In their work, the researchers used Opal-RT, a tool that provides a complete range of real-time simulation and control prototyping systems for power grids and power electronics for a wide variety of applications, including large power grids and renewable energy systems.