The SPARK Laboratory, which is affiliated with the Power and Energy Institute of Kentucky (PEIK) and operates within the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at the University of Kentucky (UK) College of Engineering, has recently expanded its collaboration with QM Power, Inc through the award of a multi-year directly sponsored project. QM Power, a start-up company based in Kansas City, MO, had its initial research and development supported, among others, by the Department of Energy (DOE), NASA, and the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and more recently successfully raised substantial private investment capital. SPARK and QM Power already collaborate on a DOE sponsored project for the future generation of machines and drives for electric vehicles.
Dan M. Ionel, ECE Professor and L. Stanley Pigman Chair in Power, Director of the SPARK Lab and of the PEIK Institute, will serve at UK as the principal investigator (PI) for the project leading a team of researchers. At QM Power, Mr. Joe Flynn, principal inventor and CTO, and Dr. Hari Harikumar, CEO, will serve as the technical and business project leads, respectively. The new project will analyze and optimize some of QM Power's innovative and patented technologies and designs by employing the SPARK Group premier expertise in electric machines and drives, low frequency electromagnetics, and applied evolutionary computational intelligence.