Dear IDC members,

We are very glad to announce that Dr. Noriko Kawakami has been awarded the 2023 IEEE IAS IPCSD Gerald Kliman Innovator Award.

We extend our heartfelt congratulations to Dr. Kawakami for this prestigious award.

IDC Officers

Noriko Kawakami: Summary of Technical Merits in Power Electronics

In her career, Dr. Noriko Kawakami has spent over 40 years focused on developing large capacity power electronic converters used in industrial applications. She first started working for Toshiba Corporation and then migrated to Toshiba Mitsubishi- Electrical Systems Corporation (TMEIC) when that organization was created.

During her career, she has made a number of important contributions to the technology of large power electronic converters and systems.

For a micro-grid application where multiple renewable energy converters had to operate in island mode, she developed the control methods to allow each individual converter to operate in voltage-source mode. This solution was first demonstrated at the Aichi Expo in 2005 and then applied to a micro-grid converter system at Central Japan Airport City in 2007.

She implemented a practical and effective solution to mitigate power fluctuations when integrating a 34 MW Battery Storage array (Na-S; 245MWh) into a 51 MW windfarm. This fast-responding feedback loop incorporates feedforward of the windfarm power to regulate the output power at the point of common coupling. This control method has been applied to over 190 sets of Na-S battery storage systems.

As a technical and project leader, Dr. Kawakami has led the development of a 500kW Modular Multi-level Cascaded Converter (MMCC) that uses many Lithium-ion battery modules as part of the converter system. Full scale verification testing has demonstrated that the MMCC provides the capability of balancing the state of charge of each battery module as well as riding through low-voltage sags.

Dr. Kawakami led both the development and field testing of a 250 kW, 300 kVdc MMC converter designed for bidirectional HVDC control. Since 2019, this HVDC system has been operating and achieving successful control of power flow between Hokkaido and Honshu islands in Japan. This converter incorporates an effective practical “black-start” capability that is not possible to achieve using a traditional thyristor–based converter.