Positions for 2 PhD's within the Project ANRGI at the University of Twente

The Power Electronics and Electromagnetic Compatibility Group within the department Electrical Engineering has two vacancies for Ph.D. researchers to work in close collaboration with Indonesian researchers and industry partners.

The project ANRGI (Accessible, Natural, Renewable, Growing, Interactive/Implementation) is funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO, Merian Fund) and the Indonesian Ministry for Research and Technology (RISTEKBRIN) under the joint call for proposals ‘Cooperation Indonesia-The Netherlands Renewable Energy 2019’ and with the aim to aim to further stimulate long term research collaboration between their two countries by funding joint research, to strengthen the international position and global impact of their research. Within this project, we cooperate with Indonesian academic and industrial partners, Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) and PT. LEN Industri.

The objective of the project is to enable the rapid increase of energy access in remote areas, an increase in energy efficiency to reduce cost of ownership and improvement in quality of the supply.

Conventional smart-grid research is founded on large distribution grids with a huge diversity of loads, and control in the minutes-range. We need a paradigm shift for micro-grids for remote areas and island configurations that avoids over-dimensioning while keeping quality of supply.

RESEARCH FIELD - Electromagnetic Compatibility (1PhD) and Power Electronics (1PhD)

The PhD researchers will participate in the following tasks:

Energy accessibility - Load profile

Power analyzers and loggers will be developed and used to establish an energy loading profile, including peak loads, short temporary/intermittent loads, and distortion of the supply.

Energy efficiency

The use of super-capacitors for intermittent loads and rapid active filtering will be investigated. These involve rapid control techniques of modern power electronics, electromagnetic interference filtering, balancing with batteries, and multi-channel time-domain measurement techniques.

Energy sharing – growth and implementation

Upscaling renewable energy sources and combining different techniques will be investigated via measurement, modeling and validation. Experimental implementation on test beds is also planned.

Societal impact and Theory of Change

Creating societal impact of the research contributions is a strong component of this project. The candidates will collaborate with researchers from other disciplines, including social scientists, and contribute to capacity development and knowledge exchange, stakeholder engagement and impact assessment.