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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 21, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 2006

Control of Rubber Tyred Gantry Crane With


Energy Storage Based on Supercapacitor Bank
Sang-Min Kim, Member, IEEE, and Seung-Ki Sul, Fellow, IEEE

AbstractThis paper proposes a hybrid energy system, which


consists of a diesel-engine generator and a supercapacitor, for
improving performance of a rubber tyred gantry crane (RTGC).
The supercapacitor contributes to the energy recovery associated
with regenerative braking in Hoist-Down braking operation
and to the rapid energy consumption related with acceleration in
Hoist-Up operation of the RTGC. Hence, it does save energy
which is conventionally wasted by a braking resistor. Moreover,
the large engine generator is replaced by the much smaller one,
because the supercapacitor reduces high power demands away
from it. For the power conversion between the supercapacitor
and the dc link, a three-leg bidirectional dcdc converter, which
has the same structure as the commercially available three-phase
inverter, is used. Two kinds of simulations are performed to study
the behaviors of the proposed system under the worst operating
conditions. The performance of the proposed hybrid energy system
is evaluated through several experiments with a real RTGC. The
proposed system can cut down the fuel consumption by 35% and
the emission of engine by more than 40%.
Index TermsRubber tyred gantry crane (RTGC), unified
power quality controller (UPQC).

I. INTRODUCTION

HE SUPERCAPACITOR is being applied in many fields,


such as power smoothing in elevator applications, peak
power demand and regenerative braking in hybrid-electric vehicles, and voltage sag compensation in unified power quality
controller (UPQC) [1][4]. It has two outstanding features; its
energy density is approximately one hundred times higher than
that of the conventional aluminum electrolytic capacitor, and
its power density is approximately ten times higher than that
of the battery [5]. This storage device can be applied as an energy buffer to the electric power system of a rubber tyred gantry
crane (RTGC) which is used to load and unload containers from
trucks in such ports as Kwang Yang, Osaka, Hong Kong, etc.
[6].
The RTGC has rubber tires like the bus or truck. It moves
around on the yard. Thats the reason why it cannot draw the
electric power from the utility grid. Therefore a diesel-engine
generator (GenSet) is used as its power source. A key factor
to determine the size of the GenSet is the power needed in a
hoist-up mode when the container is lifted up. Considering the

Manuscript received July 22, 2005; revised November 30, 2005. Recommended by Associate Editor M. G. Simoes.
The authors are with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-744, Korea (e-mail:
gpkim74@eepel.snu.ac.kr; gpkim74@empal.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPEL.2006.880260

hoist-up operation time which occupies less than 20% of the


whole operation time, most operations do not require such a
large engine power. Only one third of the present engine power
is enough to sustain the average hoist operation as well as the
trolley and gantry operations. Moreover, most of the time in the
hoist-up operation is dedicated to the constant speed motion in
which power demand is less than 60% of the maximum power
demand. The peak power demand lasts only 1 or 2 s at the end
of acceleration. Also the regenerated energy in the hoist-down
operation is wasted by dynamic braking.
In this paper, a hybrid RTGC using a supercapacitor-based energy storage system is proposed as shown in Fig. 1. The bank of
a supercapacitor is composed of several modules arranged both
in series and parallel. The principal function of supercapacitor
in this application is to level the power of the electric drive so
that the GenSet, the main source of energy, can be sized to provide only the average power requirements. Equipped with a supercapacitor selected adequately, the size of the GenSet can be
reduced to about a third of the conventional one. It is connected
through a three interleaved bidirectional dcdc converter to the
dc link to supply energy in the event of peak power demand
and store energy in the event of regeneration. For optimal load
sharing between the engine and the supercapacitor, an indirect
control method using an estimated frequency of the engine generator is proposed. The frequency estimation is based on a single
phase locked loop (PLL) with all-pass filter (APF) [7]. But this
paper proposes a method in which the natural frequency of the
APF is updated according to the estimated frequency. The behaviors of the proposed system under the worst operating condition are studied through the system-level and circuit-level simulations. And then the several experiments with a real RTGC are
done to verify the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid energy
system.
II. ENERGY STORAGE SYSTEM USING SUPERCAPACITOR
A. Power Demand of RTGC
The RTGC has typical load cycles described in Fig. 2. It has
the high power demand during the hoist-up operation in which
the container is lifted up, as well as the high power restitution
during the hoist-down operation in which the container is lifted
down. Thus the supercapacitive storage device should not only
supply the energy needed in motoring, but also absorb the energy recovered in regeneration. One third of the conventional
size of GenSet is enough to sustain the power demand in the
trolley mode, the horizontal motion between column six and
column one.
The waveforms shown in Fig. 3 are the representative power,
voltage, current and speed profiles of a RTGC for the worst case;

0885-8993/$20.00 2006 IEEE

KIM AND SUL: CONTROL OF RUBBER TYRED GANTRY CRANE

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Fig. 1. Hybrid RTGC system with a supercapacitor as the energy storage device.

Fig. 2. Typical load cycles of RTGC (


hoist-up
hoist-up
trolley-right
hoist-down).
down

trolley-left hoist-

a container is first moved from the fourth layer and sixth column
to the first layer and first column and then moved back to the
starting point. These are the simulation results of a real 4 1
RTGC, where the term 4 1 means that there are five layers
and the one additional layer above the first layer is for horizontal
motion, with a half load (a 25-ton container). It is assumed that
a 120-kW GenSet supplies the average power requirement. In
is the power needed (or regenerated) in the
Fig. 3(a),
is the ou3mtput power of the supercapacRTGC operation,
is the power supplied by the GenSet. The difitor, and
and
is supference between the two powers
plied (or stored) by the supercapacitor. The maximum power
demand reaches up to 290 kW in the simulation. The power demand in the constant speed region of the first hoist-up operation
is 240 kW. In this case, the energy needed from the supercapacitor is 2.9 MJ. The energy needed for the worst case with full
load is 3.4 MJ.

Fig. 3. RTGC Simulation: (a) power demand P


, supercapacitor power
P
and engine-generator power P
, (b) internal voltage V
and
output current of supercapacitor I , and (c) hoist and trolley speeds (HU:
hoist-up, HD: hoist-down, TL: trolley left, TR: trolley right).

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 21, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 2006

Fig. 4. Bidirectional dcdc converter.

B. System Specification
From the above simulation results, the number of supercapacitor cell is selected around five hundred (several hundreds of
series and two parallel), on the basis that the maximum voltage
of each supercapacitor cell is 2.3 V, and its minimum voltage
is 0.76 V. As a consequence, the capacitance of the supercapacitor bank used in this study is several tens of Farad and the
equivalent series resistance (ESR) is around 100 m . The maximum stored energy becomes around 4 MJ. The total weight of
the supercapacitor bank is about 400 kg. A third of the original
GenSet is used to supply the average power demand. The total
dc link capacitance normally used in the inverter power stacks
for hoist/trolley/gantry motors is no less than 23 mF.
C. Topology of Bidirectional DCDC Converter
There can be lots of converter topology for realizing a bidirectional dcdc converter. This application requires handling
several hundred amperes of load current. The high current requirement is best met by using parallel converter modules [8].
The three-phase inverter stack as shown in Fig. 4 has many advantages. First of all, it is commercially available. Second, the
converter can be operated in the interleaved manner, for it has
three buckboost converter modules. Therefore, the current is
distributed among three converter modules. With an appropriate
phase shift among the switching sequence of converter modules,
three switching ripples cancel one another greatly reducing the
input and output current ripples. Third, the modular approach
provides the system with fault tolerance against the failure of a
single module. Finally the whole stack size including three inductors is smaller than that of a single buckboost converter.
The three paralleled inductors are made from metal powder.
Their inductances vary from 220 H to 110 H as the current
increases to 300 A. It is designed that the converter always operates in continuous conduction mode (CCM).
The bidirectional dcdc converter in Fig. 4 is operated on the
boost mode in which electric power is supplied from the supercapacitor stage (low voltage stage) to the dc link capacitor stage
(high voltage stage), and on buck mode in which electric power
is absorbed from the dc link capacitor stage to the supercapacitor stage.

Fig. 5. Simulation results of dcdc converter for regulating the dc link voltage
in case of discharging the supercapacitor.

D. Detailed DCDC Converter Simulation


The detailed simulations of bidirectional dcdc converter to
investigate charging and discharging characteristics of supercapacitor were performed using Matlab/Simulink with PLECS
simulation package [9]. Fig. 5 shows the simulation results of
the voltage and current controlled dcdc converter for regulating
the dc link voltage to 630 V while the supercapacitor supplies
the energy of 220 kW to the dc link; discharging mode. In this
figure, the relationship between the internal voltage and terminal
voltage of supercapacitor can be written in

where
is the internal voltage of the supercapacitor,
is
the terminal voltage of the supercapacitor, ESR is the equivais the output
lent series resistance of the supercapacitor, and
current of the supercapacitor.
III. CONTROL STRATEGIES
A. Load Sharing Between GenSet and Supercapacitor
To optimize the fuel usage of the GenSet, it is required to
control load sharing between the GenSet and the supercapacitor. To accomplish the optimum load sharing, that is, to control
the output power of generator, it is essential to know the information of the generating power of GenSet. In this paper, instead
of direct measurement of the power, an indirect control method
using the speed-droop characteristics of the GenSet is presented
to reduce complexity and the components.
B. Speed-Droop Characteristics of GenSet
Basically, a GenSet has two control loops; governor and automatic voltage regulator (AVR). The governor regulates the
engine rotational speed by adjusting the throttle angle. Engine

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Fig. 7. Single PLL with APF and frequency adjustment.

Fig. 6. Speed-droop characteristics according to the output power of the generator: (a) steady-state characteristics and (b) transfer function between power
and frequency.

speed means the frequency of the output voltage. The AVR regulates the terminal voltage of the generator by the field current
control. In our application, the generator output voltage was set
to 480 Vrms and the frequency to 60 Hz.
Normally, a governor has the speed-droop characteristics
[10]. It reduces the reference speed as the output power of the
generator is increased as shown in Fig. 6(a). If the frequency
is known, then the generating power can be estimated. Some
experiments were performed to get the speed droop characteristics according to the output power as shown in Fig. 6(b). And
it has been modeled as following equation.

where
is the droop frequency and
is the power output of the generator. From the experimental results, the inverse gain of the transfer function is calculated as
43.75 kW/Hz and the time constant is done as
0.5 s
for our 120-kW GenSet.
A single PLL method, which needs the information of a line to
line voltage, is applied to estimate the frequency of three-phase
voltages.

Fig. 8. APF implemented in discrete form.

where
2
is the natural frequency of APF and
is
selected as 60 Hz.
are transformed into the
These two voltages
synchronously rotating -frame to get the synchronous -axis
using the estimated angle . The generator frevoltage
quency is estimated using a PI regulator and a feed-forward
term as follows:

where
is the feed-forward term and
is the estimated
generator frequency.
This paper proposes the frequency adjustment algorithm for
APF to take the frequency variation into account. In other words,
according to the frequency variation of the generator, the natural
frequency of APF is updated as follows:

The APF is implemented in discrete form as shown in Fig. 8.


Its equation can be written as follows:

C. Frequency Estimation Using the Proposed Single PLL


The generator frequency can be estimated using the single
PLL method as shown in Fig. 7. The measured line voltage
is phase shifted by 90 using APF to get the stationary d-axis
voltage

where the input


, the output
the coefficient is as follows:

, and

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 21, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 2006

Fig. 9. Block diagram of the frequency controller; P is the output power of


the supercapacitor, P
is the load power from hoist or trolley motor, P
is the output power of the generator.

Fig. 11. Schematic flowchart of changeover scheme between two controllers;


Payload is the weight of the container.
Fig. 10. Block diagram of the voltage controller; P
dc link capacitor.

is the input power of the

D. Frequency and Voltage Controller


Using the generator model derived from experiments, a PI
frequency controller is designed as shown in Fig. 9. The droop
frequency estimate is calculated as follows:

where
is the no load frequency of the generator and
is the estimated generator frequency.
Using the dynamics of the dc link capacitor, a PI voltage controller is also designed as shown in Fig. 10.

IV. EXPERIMENT WITH A REAL RTGC


An energy storage system with the supercapacitor for a real
RTGC as shown in Fig. 12 has been designed to validate the
feasibility of the proposed method. The supercapacitor which is
composed of several modules arranged in series and parallel is
used as a storage device or an auxiliary power source. It is connected through a 250-kW bidirectional dcdc converter to the
dc link to supply energy in the event of peak power demand of
the hoist-up operation and store energy in the event of regeneration of the hoist-down operation. The GenSet of which the
rating is one third of that of the conventional one is used as a
main power source. The overall control algorithms are implemented on a TMS320vc33 digital signal processor (DSP). The
sampling period of the overall controller is 1 ms and the current
sampling period is 100 s in this application.
A. Interleaved Operation of DCDC Converter

E. Changeover Between Two Controllers


Fig. 11 shows the schematic flowchart of changeover scheme
between two controllers; frequency and voltage controllers.
In the voltage control mode, a reference dc link voltage is
set somewhere above the diode-rectified value of the generator
output voltage. In this case, only the supercapacitor supplies the
energy required in hoist-up motion, or saves the energy regenerated from hoist-down motion. But, if the demand power in
hoist-up motion is larger than the maximum output power of
the supercapacitor, the generator automatically supplies the required power according to the decrease of dc link voltage; two
power sources simultaneously supply the power and the supercapacitor acts as a main power source.
In the frequency control mode, the generator is controlled to
supply the rated power. When it operates in hoist-up mode, the
supercapacitor supplies the additional power because the demand power is larger than the rated power of the generator; two
power sources simultaneously supply the power and the generator acts as a main power source. When it operates in the trolley
mode or remains in the idle mode, the supercapacitor charges
itself using the energy from the generator.

Fig. 13 shows the experimental current waveforms of


dcdc converter in case of charging with the reference current
100 A. As shown in Fig. 13(a), the current ripple
of the supercapacitor is about a half of that of the individual
inductor in the transient state. Fig. 13(b) shows that the current
ripple of the supercapacitor is less than one fifth of that of the
individual inductor in the steady state.
B. Estimation of Generator Frequency
To verify the performance of the proposed PLL method, the
estimation result of the generator frequency is compared with
that of the zero-crossing detector. The whole estimation algorithms are executed in 20 s; it means the resolution of the
zero-crossing detector is 0.430 .
Fig. 14 shows the experimental waveforms on estimation of
the generator frequency using the proposed single PLL method.
In the steady state, the estimation error is less than 0.1 Hz.
C. RTGC Operation With the Hybrid Energy System
Fig. 15 shows the experimental waveforms on the hoist-up,
trolley and hoist-down operations of the hybrid RTGC when the

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Fig. 12. Energy storage system with the supercapacitor for a RTGC.

Fig. 14. Experimental results of frequency estimation using the proposed


single PLL (f : the estimated frequency of the proposed single PLL,
: the estimated frequency of zero-crossing detector, V : the line
f
voltage of the generator).

Fig. 13. Experimental current waveforms of dcdc converter in case of


charging with the reference current I
100 A: (a) transient response
and (b) steady-state response (I : current of the inductor 1, I : current of
: sampled current of the
the inductor 2 which is phase-shifted by 120 , I
supercapacitor, I
: measured current of the supercapacitor).

=0

weight of the container is 10 tons. The supercapacitor voltage


is initially charged up to 565 V and it operates in the voltage
control mode. When the crane starts to hoist up the container
(region I), the voltage controller tries to regulate the dc link

voltage by 690 V. But it goes down to 635 V, because the supercapacitor current is saturated by the maximum reference current of 500 A limiting the output power of the supercapacitor.
Therefore, the generator automatically supplies the difference
between the power demand and the output power of the supercapacitor. Its frequency goes down until the end of the hoist-up
operation. After 12 s, the supercapacitor voltage goes down to
350 V. This activates the frequency conless than
trol mode. At the end of this period, the supercapacitor voltage
goes down to 275 V. When the crane moves the container in
the horizontal direction (region II: trolley operation), the trolley
motor does not need much power. Because it is operated in the
frequency control mode, the large amount of power from the
generator flows to the supercapacitor. After the supercapacitor
440 V, the voltage control
is charged more than
mode is activated. When the crane hoist down the container (region III), the power regenerated from the hoist motor flows to
and charges the dc link capacitor. And the voltage controller
regulates the dc link voltage to 690 V so that this regenerated
power flows to and charges the supercapacitor. When the supercapacitor is charged up to 565 V, it stops charging. And thus the

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 21, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER 2006

Fig. 15. Experimental waveforms of the hybrid RTGC with a 10 ton load container; hoist-up, trolley, and hoist-down operations.

Fig. 16. Experimental waveforms of the hybrid RTGC with a 40 ton load container; hoist-up, trolley, and hoist-down operations.

regenerated power raises the dc link voltage, which makes the


dynamic breaker to operate. In other words, this redundant energy is consumed by the braking resistor.
Fig. 16 shows the experimental waveforms on the hoist-up,
trolley and hoist-down operations of the hybrid RTGC when
the weight of the container is 40 ton. Initially, it operates in the
voltage control mode regulating the dc link voltage to 690 V.
When the crane starts to hoist up the container (region I), the frequency control mode is activated because the payload is greater
28 tons. The frequency controller reguthan the payload
60 Hz 2.6 Hz so
lates the generator frequency to 57.4 Hz
that the generator supplies its rated power to the hoist motor. The
supercapacitor supplies the difference between the power demand and the output power of the generator. This operation lasts
for 36 s. At the end of this period, the supercapacitor voltage
goes down to 220 V. When the crane moves the container in
the horizontal direction (region II: trolley operation), the trolley
motor does not need much power. But because the supercapac, it is still operated in the freitor is discharged less than
quency control mode so that the large amount of power from
the generator flows to the supercapacitor. The supercapacitor is
charged up to 440 V. After this operation, the voltage control
mode is activated. When the crane hoist down the container (region III), the power regenerated from the hoist motor flows to
and charges the dc link capacitor. And the voltage controller
regulates the dc link voltage to 690 V so that this regenerated
power flows to and charges the supercapacitor. When the supercapacitor is charged up to 565 V, it stops charging. And thus the
regenerated power raises the dc link voltage, which makes the
dynamic breaker to operate.

TABLE I
FUEL CONSUMPTION COMPARISON

D. Improved Fuel Efficiency


Table I compares the fuel consumptions between the proposed system and the conventional one. As mentioned before,
the GenSet of the proposed system is one third times smaller
than that of the conventional one. The CASE 1 means that
the GenSet is idling and outputs no electric power for one hour.
The CASE 2 means that the generator supplies the power for

the auxiliary load such as fans, hydraulic pumps and lights for
one hour. Normally, the auxiliary load is less than 20 kW. The
CASE 3 means that the 50-kW RL load draws the power from
the generator for one hour. The RL load consists of the several
inductors and resistors. The CASE 4 and CASE 5 mean
that the generator supplies the power required for the typical
one cycle of operations; the container is first moved from the
4th layer and 6th column to the 4th layer and 1st column and
then moved back to the starting point in a similar manner to that
shown in Fig. 2. While the CASE 4 shows the results with
10-ton container, the CASE 5 does the results with 40-ton
container. The CASE 6 and CASE 7 mean that the generator supplies the power required for one cycle of operations
with 10-ton container. The CASE 6 shows the results of the
best case; the container is first moved from the first layer and
sixth column to the fourth layer and first column and then moved
back to the starting point in a similar manner to that shown in
Fig. 2. The CASE 7 shows the results of the worst case; the
container is first moved from the fourth layer and sixth column
to the first layer and first column and then moved back to the
starting point in a similar manner to that shown in Fig. 2.
From CASE 4 to CASE 7, there are regeneration processes.
Therefore, it is the key issue in these cases how much energy can
be recuperated. If the RTGC was automated, it would be easy to
find the optimum energy saving strategy. But the crane is operated by a human operator; the next operation is not known to the

KIM AND SUL: CONTROL OF RUBBER TYRED GANTRY CRANE

controller and thus it is not easy to find the optimum strategy.


The following two simple rules are applied. First, in the trolley
operation, the dcdc converter is switched off; the supercapacitor should not be charged or discharged. Second, the supercapacitor should be fully charged before the every hoist-up operation. Based on data in Table I, it can be concluded that 35% of
energy saving is possible with the proposed system in practical
loading and unloading operations.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a supercapacitor-based energy storage system
to improve the energy efficiency of a RTGC has been proposed.
A supercapacitor (or ultra-capacitor) is selected as an energy
storage device considering the initial and maintenance cost. For
power conversion between the supercapacitor and the dc link,
a three-legs bidirectional dcdc converter is used. It should be
noted that it has the same structure as the commercially available three-phase inverter. For optimal load sharing between the
engine and the supercapacitor, an indirect control method using
an estimated frequency of the engine generator is proposed. The
frequency estimation is based on a single PLL with APF. But,
in the proposed method, the natural frequency of the APF is updated according to the estimated frequency. In this way, the measured line voltage is accurately phase shifted by 90 to get the
-axis voltage. With a smaller engine generator, the emission
can be reduced by 40%. The fuel efficiency is improved very
much; that is to say, the saved energy reaches up to around 35%.
It is due to the small engine and the supercapacitor which saves
the regenerated energy in case of hoist-down operation. The reduced operating cost can offset the additional cost of a supercapacitor bank and dcdc converter stack within three years under
the consideration of the difference of engine generator cost and
future mass production of supercapacitor. In addition, the total
weight and volume is cut down by 15% of the conventional engine generator even with additional dcdc converter and supercapacitor bank. The performance of the proposed hybrid energy
system has been evaluated through several experiments with a
real RTGC.
REFERENCES
[1] A. Rufer and P. Barrade, A supercapacitor-based energy-storage
system for elevators with soft commutated interface, IEEE Trans.
Ind. Appl., vol. 38, no. 5, pp. 11511159, Sep./Oct. 2002.

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[2] E. J. Cegnar, H. L. Hess, and B. K. Johnson, A purely ultracapacitor


energy storage system for hybrid electric vehicles utilizing a microcontroller-based DCDC boost converter, in Proc. 19th Annu. IEEE
APEC, 2004, pp. 11601164.
[3] R. M. Shupbach and J. C. Balda, 35 kW ultracapacitor unit for power
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[4] J. L. Duran-Gomez, P. N. Enjeti, and A. Jouanne, An approach to
achieve ride-through of an adjustable-speed drive with flyback converter modules powered by super capacitors, IEEE Trans. Ind. Appl.,
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[6] D. Kim, R. B. Langley, and S. Kim, High-precision crane guidance:
Shipyard giants, GPS World Mag., vol. 13, pp. 2834, Sep. 2002.
[7] Y. Jung, J. So, G. Yu, and J. Choi, Modelling and analysis of active
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[8] B. Choi, Comparative study on paralleling schemes of converter modules for distributed power applications, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron.,
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[9] Plexim GmbH, PLECS: Piece-Wise Linear Electrical Circuit Simulation for Simulink, Tech. Rep., 2004.
[10] P. Kundur, Power System Stability and Control. New York: McGrawHill, 1994, ch. 11.
Sang-Min Kim (M05) was born in Kimje, Korea,
in 1974. He received the B.S. degree in control
and instrumentation engineering, the M.S. degree
in electrical engineering, and the Ph.D. degree in
electronic engineering from Chonbuk National
University, Chonju, Korea, in 1996, 1998, and 2003,
respectively.
Currently, he is doing his Post-Doctorate at the
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea.
His research interests include nonlinear control and
applications to ac drive systems, and power electronics.

Seung-Ki Sul (S78M80SM98F00) was born


in Korea in 1958. He received the B.S., M.S., and
Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Seoul
National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1980, 1983, and
1986, respectively.
From 1986 to 1988, he was an Associate Researcher with the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin,
Madison. From 1988 to 1990, he was a Principal
Research Engineer with Gold-Star Industrial Systems Company. Since 1991, he has been a member
of the faculty of the School of Electrical Engineering, Seoul National University, where he is currently a Professor. His current research interests are
power-electronic control of electric machines, electric/hybrid vehicle drives,
and power-converter circuits.

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