The main expertise areas of the group are the intersection of the field of power converters with those of applied control, renewable energies, power conditioning, power quality and devices design.
The Group of Industrial Electronics and Automatic Control (GAEI) applies knowledge of electrical and magnetic forces to the processing, conditioning and control of electrical energy in low-power systems whose applications range form electric vehicles to renewable energy technologies.
GAEI has specialized in the design of DC-DC switching converters according to specifications for industrial applications or academic requirements. The intersection of the field of power converters with those of applied control, renewable energies, power conditioning, power quality, and devices design constitute the main expertise areas of the group.
The research activity of GAEI is currently located in four related areas:
- Renewable energies
- Electric vehicles
- Power conversion architectures
- Control and non-linear dynamics
Transversal to all the areas, the research of GAEI is also devoted to introducing SiC and GaN devices in power converters in order to improve their efficiency and global performances. This research is carried out in the frame of the CONSOLIDER project CSD 2009-0046, which is a joint work between the National Center for Microelectronics in Barcelona and 6 Spanish universities plus Tecnalia, and represents a cooperation of 12 research teams , thus constituting the largest-ever collaboration in the field of power electronics in Spain.
The power electronics research at Rovira i Virgili University was initiated in 1994 under the name of Nonlinear Systems Research Group (NSRG) in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ETSE). In 1999, a M.Sc. degree in Industrial Electronics and Automatic Control started in ETSE imparted by NSRG researchers, and in 2002 Power Electronics Ph. D education began. NSRG was renamed GAEI in 2000.
GAEI has been recognized as a competitive consolidated research group by the Catalan Agency for Research (AGAUR) in 2005, 2009 and 2014.