University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez Facilities
UPRM facilities used for CPES research occupy about 2,500 sq.ft. and include the Power Electronics Laboratory, the Electric Energy Processing Systems Laboratory (E2PSyL), the Integrated Circuit Design Laboratory (ICDL), and the Rapid Systems Prototyping (RASP) Laboratory. In the last eight years, over $1.3M from federal and industrial funds have been invested for the improvement of infrastructure of facilities used in CPES research at UPRM. E2PSyL is a leading facility in the Caribbean in electric energy research and in the education of researchers and professionals in the energy field. (E2PSyL) has experimental and computational facilities for research in power electronics and power systems at UPRM. E2PSyL also supports multi-disciplinary projects with Mechanical Engineering. The laboratory was established under NSF grant ECS 9702860 (PECASE Award), it is part of the Center for Power Electronics Systems (CPES) under grant ECS 9731677, was expanded by MRI grant ECS 0116314, ECS 0134021 (CAREER Award) and ECS 0224743 (NSF/ONR EPNES Grant). There are three areas that comprise E2PSyL: energy systems component testing and prototyping; energy systems component modeling and simulation; power quality and energy conversion. One of the major single grants was the Major Research Instrumentation Award by the Electrical and Communication System Division of NSF in the amount of $150K in January 2002. This grant was used to expand existing facilities and to build three testbeds: 1) power electronics and drives, 2) power quality, and 3) transient studies. The instrumentation and equipment were acquired for experimentation and testing at power levels up to 15 kW, compatible with many industrial applications. E2PSyL has been used to develop design projects and laboratory experiments at both graduate and undergraduate levels.
The Energy Systems Instrumentation Laboratory (ESIL) consists of two areas: the energy conversion lab and a power engineering capstone design area. The main objective of ESIL is to support power engineering education and undergraduate research. It provides over 1,200 sq.ft. in space and resources for laboratory courses, laboratory sessions within courses, seminars and student projects.
The Integrated Circuits Design Laboratory (ICDL) is located in Room 210B, Stefani Building in the UPRM campus. The facility provides 800 sq.ft. devoted to the tasks of designing and testing analog, digital, and mixed-signal integrated circuits and systems. The facility was established in 1999 with the sponsorship of Texas Instruments (TI) under the UPRM-TI Collaborative Program. It provides 16 design workstations running industry-grade software tools for the design entry and design validation in bipolar and MOS technologies. In addition, the lab provides four testing stations with state-of-the-art test and measurement tools used by senior and graduate students in advanced and graduate course projects in electronics, as well as graduate research students for their projects. Specialized software tools in ICDL include NI-LabView, Tanner Tools, Aldec ActiveHDL/Synplify, and Xilinx IDE 7.0. A quad processor Sun Enterprise 450 file server running Sun Solaris serves ICDL.
The Rapid Systems Prototyping (RASP) Laboratory provides the infrastructure and programming tools for developing digital system prototypes from hardware description languages and general programming. It also provides modeling and simulation tools, reconfigurable hardware platforms, testing equipment, and system development tools. This is a dedicated research laboratory used only by graduate students. RASP provides 250 sq.ft. of space accommodating eight workstations for graduate students and one prototyping workstation with hardware tools and testing equipment. Software tools in RASP include all those available in ICDL plus remote availability of the software Maxwell Q3D from Ansoft. This last tool is used in the modeling of board structures for analytical parasitic extraction in some of the projects carried in the facility.
The shared state-of-the-art facilities made available through CPES partnering have been instrumental in ensuring success of proposals for associated funds including Career Awards, equipment grants and other large research initiatives.
The Electric Energy Processing Systems Laboratory at UPRM