Power Seminar Series with Hugo Villegas: Teaching the Basics of Modern and Classical Power Systems

Teaching the Basics of Modern and Classical Power Systems

Abstract. A contemporary challenge in power system education pertains to boosting the content of power electronics knowledge in classical power engineering courses. The reason is that power industry and academia worldwide are rapidly adopting time-domain or electromagnetic-transient modeling and simulations. This to understand the behavior of power electronics devices when interconnecting them to classical power systems which were of electromechanical nature. In this vein, teaching time-domain techniques while linking them to the classical phasor analysis is paramount to help novice students keep up with a wide spectrum of expectations by power industry and academia. This talk will focus on an approach to teach undergraduate students both time-domain techniques as well as phasor analysis applied to power systems while grounded on first principles and fair mathematical rigor. It will also examine about the challenges encountered when deploying this strategy to teach ‘Energy Systems and Power Electronics’ at Iowa State University in post-COVID years and potential mitigation approaches.

Bio. Hugo earned the degree of Ingeniero en electrónica, automatización y control from Universidad de las Fuerzas Armadas – ESPE, Sangolquí, Ecuador, in 2008, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA, in 2011, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA, in 2016.

At present, Hugo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University. Hugo’s teaching and research interests lie at the intersection of renewable energy conversion, power system dynamics and protections, power restoration processes, and control systems. Hugo was the recipient of the Fulbright scholarship from 2009 to 2011, the Best paper award by the IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion for 2013–2014, the IEEE Power & Energy Society Prize paper award for 2015, the Harpole-Pentair developing faculty award for 2021–2024, and the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2024.

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