Aurenice M. Oliveira

Design, construction, and testing of an electric machine test-bed for use in laboratory and research education

Research and education into various methods of improving energy efficiency for electrical devices has become increasingly important to meet future energy needs. Because of this need, an electrical machine test-bed was designed and built in collaboration with a senior design team for the purpose of furthering research and education in the area of power electronics and motor drives. Both the engineering education and research capabilities aspects of this test-bed have an important role in educating engineers with skills to quickly contribute to the power and energy related industry. This paper will discuss the design, construction, and testing of a research quality electric machine dynamometer and test-bed for use in undergraduate and graduate (UG/Grad) education, as well as for research into power electronics and motor control.

Control system development for undergraduate exposure

The more “real world” exposure students get on all aspects of control system development the better prepared they will be to quickly adapt to product development in industry. Undergraduate student involvement in automotive hybrid development competitions, such as EcoCAR, exposes them to areas that they usually not see in typical undergraduate controls courses. EcoCAR design competition exposes them to a product development experience very similar to what they would see in industry. This paper will discuss the benefits obtained by undergraduate students and industry sponsors participating in design competitions such as EcoCAR. The student exposure experienced in the competition includes a complete system architecture selection and design, control strategy development, both high and low level control code generation, in the loop testing, and product validation. The students also have the opportunity to interface with professionals from the sponsor companies guiding them on use of state-of-the-art industry engineering tools and techniques.

Optimum Receiver Filters for Optical Fiber Systems With Polarization Mode Dispersion

We use a semi-analytical receiver model combined with importance sampling applied to first-order polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) to show that the performance of optical fiber systems whose optical and electrical receiver filter bandwidths are optimized for polarization-mode dispersion in practical on-off-keyed systems is equivalent to the performance of the same systems in which the receiver filters are optimized for operation in the absence of PMD. We also observed an increase in the sensitivity of the performance with respect to variations in the receiver filter bandwidths in the return-to-zero format in systems with PMD when compared with PMD-free operation.

Performance characterization of multicanonical Monte Carlo method applied to polarization mode dispersion

Abstract. The numerical accuracy of the results obtained using the multicanonical Monte Carlo (MMC) algorithm is strongly dependent on the choice of the step size, which is the range of the MMC perturbation from one sample to the next. The proper choice of the MMC step size leads to much faster statistical convergence of the algorithm for the calculation of rare events. One relevant application of this method is the calculation of the probability of the bins in the tail of the discretized probability density function of the differential group delay between the principal states of polarization due to polarization mode dispersion. We observed that the optimum MMC performance is strongly correlated with the inflection point of the actual transition rate from one bin to the next. We also observed that the optimum step size does not correspond to any specific value of the acceptance rate of the transitions in MMC. The results of this study can be applied to the improvement of the performance of MMC applied to the calculation of other rare events of interest in optical communications, such as the bit error ratio and pattern dependence in optical fiber systems with coherent receivers.

Integration of funded faculty research, capstone experiences and industry requirements

This paper presents a senior design strategy integrating funded faculty research and industry requirements. Students participating in this type of senior design are directly involved with all the aspects of a complete system development cycle focusing on user needs and requirements. All the aspects of the project represents higher quality and larger scale than typical senior design projects, and in this way better resemble industry projects. The case study presented herein is a practical industrial project sponsored by a faculty member the construction of a research quality electric machine dynamometer and test-bed.

Receiver optimization for 40 Gbit/s optical fiber systems with polarization mode dispersion

We show that the performance of on-off-keyed 40 Gbit/s optical fiber systems whose optical and electrical receiver filter bandwidths are optimized for polarization-mode dispersion is equivalent to the performance of the same systems in which the receiver filters are optimized for operation in the absence of PMD. We also observed an increase in the sensitivity of the performance with respect to variations in the receiver filter bandwidths in the return-to-zero format in systems with PMD when compared with PMD-free operation.

Electrical mitigation techniques for polarization mode dispersion in optical fiber systems

Electronic equalization for the mitigation of the impairments due to nonlinear and linear effects in optical fiber communication systems, including polarization mode dispersion (PMD), has become commonly used in optical fiber systems. The receiver-side equalizers applied to PMD mitigation are typically based on minimum mean-square error (MMSE) criterion and have been implemented with feedforward (FFE) and decision feedback (DFE) structures. In this paper, we use Monte Carlo method with multiple importance sampling to accurately evaluate and compare the performance of MMSE equalizers in the first-and second-order PMD plane for a realistic system dominated by ASE noise. We also discuss properties and implementation issues of the MMSE equalizers when implemented for PMD mitigation.