Pat Wheeler demonstrates the design and construction of an electric motorbike to students at a PELS Student Chapter event in April.
After nearly ten years, the Student Chapter of the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) at Virginia Tech has enjoyed a resurgence, thanks to the efforts of CPES Ph.D. students Christina DiMarino and Niloofar Rashidi Mehrabadi. The chapter invited Prof. Pat Wheeler from the University of Nottingham in April to give a lecture on the design and construction of a series-winning electric motorbike, with close to 30 undergraduate and graduate students in attendance. A few weeks later, they offered a successful magnetics workshop, where fifty students had the opportunity to design, build, and test their own inductors. Previous events have featured significant figures in the field of power electronics, including Prof. Fred Lee (a past PELS president and CPES Director) and Paige Kassalen, a crew member of the first solar-powered plane.
To celebrate the chapter's revitalization, Christina DiMarino and CPES M.S. student Amy Romero published an article in the June issue of the IEEE Power Electronics Magazine describing its plans and activities. The full article may be read
here.
