A technical paper authored by a group of Wichita State students, “Economic and Reliability Impacts of Combined Solar and Battery Energy Storage as a Non-Wire Alternative,” was recently recognized as the best paper in the 55th Annual North American Power Symposium. The paper was authored by two undergraduate students in the electrical and computer engineering program at WSU, Mary Peterson and Olivia O’Reilly, along with Esther Liu, who was a student at East High School at the time of authorship.
Peterson, O’Reilly and Liu were mentored by two then-doctoral students, Arun Kaarthick Manoharan and Sarangan Rajendran, faculty advisor Dr. Visvakumar Aravinthan, and two industry advisors, Al Tamimi and Charles Yokley, both from Sunflower Electric Power Corporation. The symposium was hosted Oct. 15-17 by Western Carolina University in Asheville, North Carolina.
In addition to receiving recognition for authorship of the paper, Peterson was also recently awarded the IEEE PES Scholarship for the second year. The scholarship is a merit scholarship awarded to undergraduate students in electrical engineering who are pursuing careers in electrical power systems.