Academic Staff

Prof. Yi Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, IEEE Senior Member, Academic Advisory Group Member of the International Energy Agency (IEA) 4E program power electronics platform. He is one of the co-funder of the ReliaPE Aps, which is a spin-off start-up providing reliability assessment tools for power electronics.

He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees from Harbin Institute of Technology, China, supervised by Prof. Dianguo Xu, in 2014 and 2016, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree from Aalborg University, Denmark, supervised by Prof. Frede Blaabjerg and Prof. Huai Wang, in 2020. All degrees are in electrical engineering. He has worked as an Assistant Professor with Aalborg University, Denmark, during 2023-2024. During 2020-2023, he was affiliated with multiple institutions as a DFF International Postdoctoral Research Fellow, including RWTH Aachen University, Germany, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. He was also a visiting scholar with Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, in 2018. His research focuses on advancing the reliability and sustainability of power electronics through design, testing, packaging, and condition monitoring. 
    
Dr. Zhang is the Guest Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics. He is recipient of the First Place Prize Paper Award of the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics in 2021, and the IEEE Power Electronics Society Ph.D. Thesis Award in 2020. 

Academic Award

• Best Special Session Organizer for the Conference IEEE IPEMC 2024 – ECCE Asia, 5.2024
• The First Place Prize Paper Award for 2020 in the IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics (first and corresponding author), 2021
• IEEE PELS Ph.D. Thesis Award in IEEE Power Electronics Society, 2020
• DFF International Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Danish Council for Independent Research, 2020
• IEEE IES Student & Young Professionals Paper Assistance (IES-SYPA), 2017
• IEEE PELS Student Paper Travel Grant, IEEE Energy Conversion Congress & Exposition (ECCE), 2017
• Outstanding Graduate, Harbin Institute of Technology, 2014

Services to Professional Bodies

• Senior Member of IEEE
• Technical Council Committee, IEEE Transportation Electrification Council – Railway Electrification Committee, 2024 – present
• Academic Advisory Group Member, International Energy Agency (IEA) 4E Program – Power Electronic Conversion Technology Platform, 2024-2029
• Working Group Voting Member, IEEE Standard P1413 Reliability Prediction, 2023 – present
• International Conference Tutorial or Invited Speech: APEC 2025, ECCE Europe 2024, IPEMC 2024 ECCE Asia 2024, PLECS Conference 2024, SIEMENS Realize Live Europe 2024, SET and ECPE Reliability Round Table 2023.
• Associate Editor: IET Power Electronics (2024-2026), Chinese Journal of Electrical Engineering (2024-2026), Elsevier’s e-Prime Journal (Senior Editor 2021-present), Applied Sciences (2023-present)
• Guest Associate Editor: IEEE Trans. Power Electronics on the topic of “Advancing PE reliability,” (2023-2024), IET Electric Power Applications (2024), Applied Science (2024), Elsevier’s e-Prime (2023), CMP Journal of Electrical Engineering (2023).
• Member, IEC Young Professional Group of Nordic Countries, 2021

Industrial collaborations

• Siemens AG, on the topic of thermal transient measurement of power semiconductors
• Infineon AG, on the topic of a new standard high-power module
• Vestas Wind Systems A/S, on the topic of reliability of wind power converter
• Nexperia, on the topic of SiC MOSFETs
• Ingeteam, on the topic of a new standard high-power module
• UTRC, on the topic of reliability of electrical aircraft
• Hyosung Korea, on the topic of early failure of modular multilevel converters
• Danfoss, on the topic of leveraging AI to advance motor drive power converters
• Hitachi Energy (previous ABB), on the topic of monitoring the health status of modular multilevel converters

Selected Publications (* is the corresponding author)

1. Y. Liao, and Y. Zhang*. "Rethinking Model-based Fault Detection: Uncertainties, Risks, and Optimization based on a Multilevel Converter Case Study." IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics (2024).
2. Y. Zhang*, Y Zhang, V H Wong, S Kalker, A Caruso, L Ruppert, F Iannuzzo, and R. W. de Doncker. "Figures-of-merit study for thermal transient measurement of SiC MOSFETs." IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics (2024).
3. Y. Zhang*, A Evgrafov, S Zhao, S Kalker, and R. W. De Doncker. "A Sparsity-Promoting Time Domain Evaluation Method for Thermal Transient Measurement of Power Semiconductors." IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics (2024).
4. Y. Zhang*, Y Zhang, Z Xu, Z Wang, V H Wong, Z Lu, and A Caruso. "Guideline for reproducible SiC MOSFET thermal characterization based on source-drain voltage." IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications 60, no. 3 (2024): 4229-4238.
5. H. Xia, Y. Zhang*, M. Chen, D. Luo, W. Lai, and H. Wang. "Capacitor Parameter Estimation based on Wavelet Transform and Convolution Neural Network." IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics (2024).
6. Y. Zhang*, Y Xu, and F Blaabjerg. "Surrogate models for power electronic systems applying machine learning techniques." In Control of Power Electronic Converters and Systems: Volume 4, pp. 333-352. Academic Press, 2024.
7. Y. Zhang*, Y Zhang, and H Wang. "gEOL: A gradient-based end-of-life criterion for power semiconductor modules." IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics 39, no. 3 (2023): 2927-2931.
8. X. Zhang, Y. Zhang*, D Zhou, X Wu, and H Wang. "Computationally Efficient Dynamic Thermal Modeling Based on Dictionary Learning Reconstruction." IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics 38, no. 12 (2023): 15152-15156.
9. Y. Zhang*, H Wang, Z Wang, F Blaabjerg, and M Saeedifard. "Mission profile-based system-level reliability prediction method for modular multilevel converters." IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics 35, no. 7 (2019): 6916-6930. (First Place Prize Paper Award)

• Bachelor of Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology
• Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology
• Doctor of Philosophy, Aalborg University