IET award recognises research work

Dr Wenlong Ming has been awarded the 2017 IET Control and Automation PhD Prize from the Institution of Engineering and Technology. This prestigious prize has been running for 7 years and is the only IET Prize in the area of Control and Automation. Wenlong won the award despite this year’s many excellent nominations.

The prize was awarded for the theoretical contribution of his PhD research work, backed up by rigorous experimental validation and an excellent publication record in top ranking IEEE journals and conferences.

Wenlong received BSc and MEng degrees in Automatic Control from Shandong University, China, in 2007 and 2010, respectively. He was awarded his PhD in Automatic Control and Systems Engineering from the University of Sheffield in 2015, under the supervision of Prof Qing-Chang Zhong and Dr Hua-Liang Wei.

He is currently working as a Lecturer in the School of Engineering at Cardiff University. His research mainly focuses on developing advanced control strategies and power electronics topologies to improve the power density, efficiency and reliability of power electronics systems for different applications, eg solar battery systems, electric vehicles (EVs) and Medium Voltage DC (MVDC) systems.

During his PhD, he has worked on using advanced control and power electronics techniques to holistically remove two major challenges in single-phase power converters, that of bulky isolating transformers and electrolytic capacitors. The developed techniques can also be applied to other types of power electronics systems to improve their power density and reliability.

Wenlong said: “I am extremely excited and honoured to receive the 2017 IET Control & Automation PhD Award. During my PhD study, I found that the holistic integration of control and power electronics technologies is one of the keys to address challenging problems in future energy and power systems. This award greatly motivates me to further explore this research field.”