Tyler McGrew, a recent Electrical Engineering graduate from Miami, will be attending grad school in the fall with a new achievement under his belt: He received the Best Paper Presentation Award at APEC.

The Applied Power Electronics Virtual Conference and Exposition (APEC) was held in June. This is a conference in which researchers can submit their work, as well as have a doorway into new opportunities and meetings with professionals in their field.

Tyler got his start in research when he took an electronics course with Dr. Mark Scott during his junior year. After McGrew realized how much he enjoyed the class, he reached out to Dr. Scott about getting more involved. He ended up working on small projects that eventually led to Tyler joining Dr. Scott in his research lab.

McGrew, working alongside Dr. Scott in the ECE department, researched artificial intelligence methods, as well as learning new ways to fight electromagnetic interference (EMI). This was the basis of the paper that they submitted to the APEC.

The goal of this research was to determine the health of certain power components within the inverter in a more non-invasive way.

The inverters they studied are from the DC current and typically found in things like electric vehicles, airplanes, etc. Within those are capacitors, which tends to be the component most likely to fail. Wanting to solve this issue, Scott and McGrew are developing a system that can monitor the health of the capacitor in a non-invasive way, with the hopes of creating a more reliable and cheap maintenance system.

The APEC presentation, originally to be held in Arizona, was moved online due to COVID. This changed the type of presentation that Tyler had to deliver. Instead, he recorded a video of him going over a slideshow of the information. No longer a live presentation, McGrew felt a lot less pressure and anxiety about the conference.

Tyler found the research process to be challenging due to it’s nature of unexplored information. Every facet had to be thought through. However, McGrew found the most rewarding part to be when all of that hard work comes together and they get to see the fruits of their labor. Finally able to submit their papers, they were able to see a tangible finish line.

In the future, Dr. Scott and McGrew are submitting a journal paper, as a sort of extension/follow up to the conference. After that, Dr. Scott will be having more students come into the lab, as Tyler will be moving towards his own path.

Not expecting to get this recognition, McGrew was quite surprised. It is not often that an undergraduate leaves such an impression- and he was found to be the best of ten presentations.

Tyler looks back at this work fondly, having worked with a great group of students and faculty, and a wonderful department overall.

Written by Kayleigh Schauseil, CEC Reporter