$3.97M ONR Award To Improve Navy Ship Power Management
ECE University Distinguished and William Lincoln Smith Professor Vincent Harris is leading a multi-institutional $3.97 million Office of Naval Research award to develop advanced magnetic materials that will operate at higher frequency and power levels, enabling more efficient and cost-effective power usage aboard Navy ships.
A multi-institutional team of researchers led by Vincent Harris, University Distinguished and William Lincoln Smith Professor, electrical and computer engineering, received a $3.97 million award from the Office of Naval Research to improve power management aboard U.S. navy ships.
The team will design and develop a new generation of high-performing magnetic materials and composites engineered to operate at frequencies up to and beyond 250 MHz, which will enable the more efficient conversion of energy into power. As a result, ships will have on-board access to a greater diversity of power across the frequency spectrum, which ultimately will bring greater efficiencies, less disruption, and lower costs.
“This will be result in greater efficiency in the onboard management of ship power allowing for greater mission scope,” Harris says.
The program, “Innovative Magnetic Material Solutions for Navy High-Frequency Power Systems,” is scheduled to run for four and a half years and will begin with the design and development of new magnetic composite materials and will conclude with the demonstration of mass production of these materials.
“We are starting with basic physics and bringing it all the way to systems engineering,” Harris says.
The project will focus on ferrite/ferromagnetic metal nanocomposites and all-ferrite composites with a goal of developing magnetics supporting advanced ultra-wide bandgap power electronics. The novel nanocomposites will be developed using traditional methods like powder ball milling, compaction, and sintering methods and will be combined with new material chemistries, processing pathways, and thermal processing techniques to produce previously inaccessible microstructures and composite systems with advanced properties.
The composites will be designed to capture a maximum power spectral density measuring in the hundreds of MHz range. Harris says he recently applied this approach to the processing of magnetic ceramic composites and created a material “extremely well-suited” to high frequency power performance.
The team will then move to an additive manufacturing phase. It will apply binder jet 3D printing to the materials development phase, with goal is to achieve cost-effective, high-volume production, demonstrate high-volume manufactured quality materials, and deliver materials for testing to the Naval Research Laboratory.
Additionally, the design will result in dual-use opportunities of MHz power inductors, which could ultimately be used in a variety of applications, including electric vehicles, green energy, power grids, data centers, and all manner of propulsion ranging from auto, freight, air, water, and space.
In addition to Harris, the multi-institutional research team includes Parisa Andalib, assistant research professor of electrical and computer engineering, who will serve as a co-principal investigator for the College of Engineering’s portion of the project; Yunume Fitcherova, senior research scientist at Northeastern’s George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security; Paul Ohodnicki, associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering; Charles Sullivan, professor of engineering at Dartmouth College Thayer School of Engineering; and Feyza Berber Halmen, research engineer at Missouri Institute of Defense and Energy at the University of Missouri.