Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
OPTIMUS Lab mark

OPTIMUS Lab

Optimal Power Transformation and Inverter Modernization with Utilizable Strategies

A wide field, seen through one device

Groups like ours are usually filed under power electronics, but that title covers circuit theory, semiconductors, electric machinery, signal processing, control, power systems, and electromagnetics at once. It is too broad to say what we actually do. So we name ourselves after the device: the inverter.

In the field

One island, as an example

We say our methods should work under real conditions, not only on paper. Biyangdo is what that means in practice.

The island sits in plain view off Hyeopjae Beach, on the northwest coast of Jeju. Wind, solar, a diesel generator, and a battery were installed there in 2017. But the renewables could not be relied on: operated together, they set the grid frequency oscillating, and a local news report in 2021 called the island’s renewable plant “good for nothing.”

Nothing new had to be built. The battery was already there; what it lacked was a control that made it behave like a generator. We redesigned its inverter’s algorithm as a virtual synchronous generator, so that it answers a frequency disturbance the way a spinning machine does — with inertia and damping.

It has run the Biyangdo microgrid since October 2022, looked after by the plant’s own staff, with no one from the lab on the island. The same design has since been extended to fifteen more islands. That it keeps working, years after the project ended, is the part we care about.

Below, the topics we pursue and the projects that fund them.

Research topics at present

Topic 01

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Topic 03

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Topic 07