A winding road, and a tough cell, for UTS’s power electronics

Unique Technical Services (UTS) embodies two of reality’s great adages – that life imitates art and form follows function.

They do. And UTS personifies it, even if the growing force in power electronics kinda got there in reverse.

With power electronics (the application of cutting-edge electronics to the control and conversion to electric power) steadily gaining steam, UTS has discovered a new path, thanks primarily to breakthroughs engineered by spinoff Unique Electric Solutions (UES), which focuses chiefly on commercial zero-emission vehicles.

Power electronics are an increasingly big deal at Stony Brook University (SBU), where the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, led by SUNY Distinguished Professor and Department Chairman Petar Djuric, recently announced the hiring of Empire Innovation Associate Professor Dr. Fang Luo, director of SBU’s Spellman High Voltage Power Electronics Laboratory.

Right in the thick of it is longtime Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center (AERTC) resident UTS and its 2018 spinoff UES, which aims to power automobiles with fuel cells.

That requires new types of power converters and batteries – things you can’t just grab at your local Best Buy, according to UTS founder Joseph Ambrosio.

“A fuel cell is almost like a solar panel,” Ambrosio says. “You have to boost the voltage by connecting a bunch in series, or develop a boost device to get to the voltage needed to power an electric vehicle.

“You can’t just buy this stuff off the shelf,” he adds. “So, we had to do a lot of electrical harnessing work and battery-management work. We developed some ground-up power electronics that didn’t exist.”

This turned out to be a familiar problem for other innovators, particularly those rigging up next-level power electronics. After recruiting “a whole bunch of smart people” to design a new UES power converter from scratch, Ambrosio and friends quickly recognized a juicy new vertical.

“The power electronics industry is still very new, especially when it comes to green energy and alternative fuels,” the innovator notes. “So, now we’re finding other customers and expanding on our work, developing other avenues for the products to go into besides fuel cells.

“We’re really focused now on bridging this gap.”