PhD Student / Research Assistant (f/m/d) as part of the MSCA EU project “inter-oPEn”, research topic: “Interactions in power electronic dominated AC-grids”

Area of research:

Scientific / postdoctoral posts

Starting date:

29.02.2024

Job description:

You will be part of the EU-funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action project inter-oPEn (“Interoperability of the Power Electronics dominated grid by openness”) as a PhD Student conducting research on the topic “Interactions in power electronic dominated AC-grids: Challenges for interoperability and controller partitioning”.

With an increasing share of power electronic assets the overall system behaviour of an integrated grid changes. With these changes, new challenges for the grid’s stability arise, induced by harmonic and transient interactions of power electronic assets, endangering not only a stable operation of the asset itself but also the overall grid stability. Goal of the potential doctoral thesis is the investigation of mentioned interactions, considering not only power electronic assets and its control design, but also the surrounded grid and its structure.

The results of the model-based investigations are meant to classify the observed interactions in terms of their potential threat to the grid stability and the corresponding parameters and conditions influencing the systems behaviour to help predicting and avoiding endangering asset and control designs. Further, the results and conclusions facilitate investigations on how these interactions could affect interoperability of several power electronic assets. Especially, the influence and the interdependence of the different stages of the converters’ control on the overall behaviour of the converter might be of interest.

The research will be conducted at the Institute of Electric Energy Systems and High-Voltage Technology (IEH) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Karlsruhe in close collaboration with the inter-oPEn academic and industrial partners, involving an academic and industrial secondment.

This research center is part of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers. With more than 42,000 employees and an annual budget of over € 5 billion, the Helmholtz Association is Germany's largest scientific organisation.