Kohei
Murakami
Postdoctoral Scholar
Kohei Murakami (he/him) is a postdoctoral scholar in the department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, under the supervision of Prof. Jan Kleissl in his NSF-funded research project, DERConnect since June 2022. He received his B.E. and Ph.D. in Engineering degrees from Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, in 2016 and 2021. At Waseda University, he was supervised by Prof. Yasuhiro Hayashi and Prof. Hideo Ishii, both in the department of Advanced Science and Engineering. Before joining UCSD, he worked for the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (CRIEPI), Japan from 2021 to 2022.
Kohei’s research interests include optimization, cybersecurity, and control of power systems and inverter resource-based microgrids. For his Ph.D. pursuit, Kohei worked on optimal voltage controls using step voltage regulators in distribution networks with photovoltaics. As part of the Ph.D. project, he developed a data-driven voltage control method using historical voltage measurements at multiple sensors in distribution networks. Also, he developed a dynamic control parameters optimization method for a step voltage regulator to maximize its voltage control performance considering the step voltage regulator’s durability. Both of his works are supported and consulted by Chubu Electric Power Grid Co., Inc. During his duty with CRIEPI, he was responsible for power quality analysis in distribution networks, working on superharmonic impacts of solar inverters in distribution networks. Since he joined UCSD, he has been working on the real-time simulation of microgrids with distributed energy resources (DERs) using real-time simulators, which are Real-Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) and Typhoon Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) simulators for DERConnect. DERConnect aims to develop a test bed of DERs and microgrids, which is remotely accessible for nationwide researchers, and then his responsibilities cover the simulation of DERs and power grids in those real-time simulators and industry-standard communication protocols to control those simulated components.