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Alexis Kwasinski, PhD
Associate Professor R. K. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Energy
1105 Benedum Hall | 3700 O’Hara Street | Pittsburgh, PA 15261 P: 412-383-6744
akwasins@pitt.edu http://www.pitt.edu/~akwasins
Prof. Kwasinski’s research is in the broad areas of sustainable and resilient power and energy systems, with a focus on microgrids, power electronics, controls, availability modeling, interdependencies characterization, smart grids, integration of energy storage devices and of renewable and alternative power sources, and advanced power distribution architectures. Prof. Kwasinski joined the University of Pittsburgh from The University of Texas at Austin where he reached the rank of Associate Professor with tenure. Early in his career he worked for almost 10 years in telecommunications power and outside plant industry. This combination of academic and industry experience provided Dr. Kwasinski with a practical research perspective based on real world applications supported by thorough theoretical analyses and strong experimental validation. In his research vision, system analysis is supported and integrated with component level studies. At Pitt, Dr. Kwasinski founded the Laboratory for the Exploration of Advanced Energy Resilience Solutions (e-LEAdERS).
Prof. Kwasinski has been studying characterization of power and communications infrastructures resilience and searching for solutions for improved performance to extreme events, such as the use of microgrids and integration of energy storage devices. He has also been developing availability models that include the effect of renewable energy sources and of lifeline infrastructures. Such models also consider the dynamic effect that local energy storage has to reduce or even prevent failure propagation from power grids into other dependent infrastructures. Resilience planning and design studies have a quantitative approach that measures degree of dependency and resilience using availability metrics and that consider power and communications infrastructures as human-cyber-physical system-of-systems. In these studies Prof. Kwasinski has conducted damage assessments in areas affected by natural disasters including hurricanes Katrina, Dolly (2008), Gustav, Ike, Isaac (2012) and Sandy, and earthquakes in Chile in 2010, New Zealand in 2011, Japan in 2011 and Napa, California, in 2014.
Power Electronic Systems
Power electronics have been enabling technologies for electric power generation, distribution and utilization, such as microgrids, that have been revolutionizing the electric power industry by challenging decadesold paradigms. These paradigm shifts also influence novel views in power electronic research integrating system and component-level studies. Prof. Kwasinski’s research is a leader in this field with studies that include advanced ac and dc power distribution architectures with active power distribution nodes, control and stabilization of constant-power loads, integration of energy storage and power generation units with multipleinput converters, and stability analysis and decentralized controls for microgrids. Prof. Kwasinski is applying this research in an NSF CyberSEES project in order to achieve more resilient and energy-sustainable wireless communication networks by integrating base station traffic, power generation and energy storage management.
