Professor Xu receives IAS award
The award honors an individual who has made an outstanding contribution in the application of electricity to industry in accordance with the scope of the IEEE Industry Application Society.
Xu began his career in the early 1970s as a junior engineer in China. He came to the United States in the early 1980s as a Ph.D. candidate at The University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He joined The Ohio State University in 1990 as an assistant professor and was promoted to full professor in 2000.
He developed a new approach to the analysis of a doubly fed brushless reluctance machine with unconventional magnetic structures and principles. This achievement directly contributed to an invention of doubly-excited, brushless wind turbine generation system, winning him the prestigious Research Initial Award given by The National Science Foundation USA in 1991.
For the following 20-plus years, he continued his research efforts to solve critical issues in optimal design, advanced control, and practical application of this new machine. He designed and built the world's first 250kw brushless doubly excited machine and controls in 2008. The testing results fully verify that the new machine was not only brushless but high efficiency of 96% over a wide speed-torque range with flexible active and reactive power control.
In 2013, he was given the first-place Society Transaction Paper Award by IAS.
Xu has also contributed uniquely to the theory and control of deep flux weakening control and wide-speed-range operation for interior permanent magnet and induction machines with a high degree of robustness and stability. The technology breakthrough overcomes the barricades met by regular vector control, achieving a base-top speed ratio of 1:9 and 1:4 for interior permanent magnet and induction machines, respectively. The deep flux weakening control algorithms have been applied to Integrated starter and generating systems for airplanes, series hybrid power train for heavy duty vehicles, and appliance drives.
For the past 40 plus years, he has published more than 180 papers on IEEE Transactions and Conference Proceedings with more than 4,700 citations.
Xu is a technology consultant to major industry companies including GM, Ford, Raytheon, Boeing, GE Aviation, Honeywell, Delphi, and US Wind Power. As an educator, he has supervised 28 Ph.D. and 35 MS students to graduation. He has been awarded The Lumley Outstanding Research Award three times by The College of Engineering at The Ohio State University.
He has also been honored as guest professor by many major universities in Asia, including Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhejing University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Southeast University, and Hunan University.
Most recently, Xu led a team of faculty members and won a major funding award of $9.8M given by the Ohio Third Frontier Program to establish a research center, focusing on SiC and GaN power electronics devices and circuits for the next-generation power conversion systems.
He has been active for 30 years in IEEE/IAS, and has served as secretary, vice chairman, and chairman for the Electric Machine Committee from 1995-2001 in IAS; an associate editor for the Transactions on Power Electronics; and an IEE/IAS executive board member.
Xu was elected to IEEE Fellow in 2004, and a distinguished lecturer for the last five years in IEEE Power and Energy Society.
