Control & Power Systems
I’m a control systems engineer with a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where my research explored the intersection of robust control, power electronics, and islanded microgrids. Over the past seven years, I’ve contributed to collaborative projects funded by ARPA-E and carried out in partnership with the National Renewable Energy Lab. My work has focused on control design, embedded implementation, and system-level optimization for distributed energy systems—often involving experimental platforms and hardware-in-the-loop demonstrations.
You can find highlights of my projects and some of instructional materials I’ve developed for both graduate and undergraduate students.
Skills
Control: LQR, LQG, H-infty, MPC, Kalman
Simulation: Simulink, PSpice, PSCAD
Hardware-in-the-Loop: OPAL-RT
Embedded Systems: TI C2000, TI Embedded Dev Tools, NI RIO, LabVIEW
Programming: Python, C/C++, MATLAB
Machine Learning Frameworks: PyTorch
CAD: EAGLE, SOLIDWORKS, AutoCAD
Publications
[1]Alireza Askarian, Jaesang Park, and Srinivasa Salapaka. Enhanced grid following inverter (e-gfl): a unified control framework for stiff and weak grids. IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, 2024. doi:10.1109/TPEL.2024.3350528.
[2]Alireza Askarian, Jaesang Park, and Srinivasa Salapaka. Multi-mode inverters: a unified control design for grid-forming, grid-following, and beyond. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.08433, 2024. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2410.08433.
[3]Jaesang Park, Alireza Askarian, and Srinivasa Salapaka. Control designs for critical-continegency responsible grid-following inverters and seamless transitions to and from grid-forming modes. In 2024 American Control Conference (ACC), volume, 2958–2963. 2024. doi:10.23919/ACC60939.2024.10644914.
[4]Jaesang Park, Alireza Askarian, and Srinivasa Salapaka. Inverter output impedance estimation in power networks: a variable direction forgetting recursive-least-square algorithm based approach. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.14077, 2024. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2410.14077.
[5]Alireza Askarian, Jaesang Park, and Srinivasa Salapaka. Control design for inverters: beyond steady-state droop laws. arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.02292, 2021. doi:10.48550/arXiv.2105.02292.
[6]Alireza Askarian, Mayank Baranwa, and Srinivasa M Salapaka. Droopless active and reactive power sharing in parallel operated inverters in islanded microgrids. In 2018 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 3427–3432. IEEE, 2018. doi:10.1109/CDC.2018.8619290.
[7]Mayank Baranwal, Alireza Askarian, Srinivasa Salapaka, and Murti Salapaka. A distributed architecture for robust and optimal control of dc microgrids. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 66(4):3082–3092, 2018. doi:10.1109/TIE.2018.2840506.
[8]Mayank Baranwal, Alireza Askarian, Srinivasa M Salapaka, and Murti V Salapaka. A robust scheme for distributed control of power converters in dc microgrids with time-varying power sharing. In 2017 American Control Conference (ACC), 1413–1418. IEEE, 2017. doi:10.23919/ACC.2017.7963151.
[9]Mayank Baranwal, Alireza Askarian, and Srinivasa M Salapaka. A decentralized scalable control architecture for islanded operation of parallel dc/ac inverters with prescribed power sharing. In 2017 American Control Conference (ACC), 1419–1424. IEEE, 2017. doi:10.23919/ACC.2017.7963152.
[10]Alireza Askarian, Mayank Baranwal, and Srinivasa Salapaka. Dc bus voltage regulation using photovoltaic module: a non-iterative method. In 2017 American Control Conference (ACC), 4099–4104. IEEE, 2017. doi:10.23919/ACC.2017.7963584.
Highlights from My Contributions to ARPA-E Initiatives.
A rigorous overview of feedback control systems for power systems, with a primary focus on AC/DC inverters.
A concise yet comprehensive overview of phasor analysis and two-dimensional reference frames in power systems.
New to power electronics? Check out this introduction to power electronics.