My name is Vahid Zahiri Barsari. I received my B.Sc. degree from IAUCTB, Tehran, Iran, and M.Eng. degree from the University of Sydney, Australia, both in electrical engineering. I am currently working toward a Ph.D. degree at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. My current research interests include power electronics, power converters, inductive power transfer (IPT), and dynamic charging of electric vehicles.
My Ph.D. research topic is Wireless Charging of Electric Vehicles, a research area which Auckland University is very well known for. (Please refer to our project website for more information: https://iptroadway.auckland.ac.nz/people/).
Before starting a Ph.D., I worked as a hardware engineer, mainly designing custom-made circuit boards. I have done many circuit designs and microcontroller-based embedded projects since high school. I have had the habit of taking videos and photos of my projects, so I thought It might be a good idea to share some of them here.
Projects
These are the projects I worked on during my Master’s and Ph.D. programs. There are the publication’s links and videos, along with a short explanation about each project.
A 3.3 kW Push-pull coupler array for wireless charging of in-motion electric vehicles (2020)
This is one of the projects I am working on in my PhD program. This is a simple yet robust multi-leg push-pull driven coupler array (PPCA) aiming to decrease the number of switches required to drive the in-road Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) couplers.
A 10 kW H-bridge based converter for IPT application (2019)
This project was group research I was involved in; thermal modeling of a 10 kW stationary IPT system. I designed the power converter, tuning circuits, and temperature data logger.
Self-tuning power supply for dynamic wireless power transfer systems (2018)
This was my Master of Engineering final year project. The system transfers 75 W across two circular coils where the air gap between them varies within the range of 10cm to 18cm. Despite this air gap variation, the transferred power remains constant with the help of a self-tuning converter in the primary and a buck converter on the secondary side.
A 3.3 kW AC/AC converter
This is a 3.3 kW AC/AC converter that can be used for different applications such as driving IPT pads, ultrasonic transducers, etc. There are three stages of power conversions in this converter: an interleaved boost PFC converter, DC/DC buck converter to control the power, a variable frequency DC/AC.
Temperature Data logger (2019)
This is a data logger I designed to meet the particular requirement for our research on studying the thermal behavior of IPT pads.
Low power DC-AC inverter (2020)
This is DC-AC 35 W inverter which is designed for EE209 course by our Power Electronics group (including my supervisor, me and another PhD student) in UoA.
The projects in this section are the ones I worked on during my high-school and Undergraduate years (2009-2015). I’ve always been trying to be innovative and propose solutions to problems, no matter how big they were. Some of the projects I am sharing here are academic projects, some of them are industrial projects, and the rest are just hobby projects. I still find some of them very interesting.
Wire Goniometer (2016)
This device is a contactless wire goniometer that is used as a feedback sensor for winding machines. It uses two CCD linear sensors and measures the angle of the wire moving above it.
Stator Tester (2013)
This device is designed to validate the correctness of the stator's winding pattern in a vehicle alternator. By measuring the magnetic flux generated by each winding and drawing it on a graph, probable fault in stator winding will be revealed.
Induction Heating (2014)
I worked on a 1kw Induction heating system as my B.Sc. final project. Induction Heating (IH) is a method by which the temperature of a ferromagnetic workpiece located at the center of a coil can be increased with no physical connection.
Self-calibrating Level-Measuring Module (2012)
This is an FPGA-based module designed to measure the level of any kind of pouring material in a vessel. It is, in fact, a precise capacitance meter ( ± 0.001 pF) which serves a special self-calibrating method. I filed a patent on this design.
Robotic Arm (2010)
This is a Pick-and-Place robotic arm with five degrees of freedom. I designed the driver board and controller for this robot in the last year of high school.
Winding Machine (2014)
This is a micro-step driver board to control the x-axis of a CNC winding machine. The size of the wire and bobbin can be set through a GLCD and a keypad.
Small Size Robot (2015)
I was involved in designing a small size robot that was intended to be taken part in SharifCup 2015 robot match.
Human-Machine Interface (2009)
Graphic LCDs have always been interesting modules to work with. To get the most out of them while using 8-bit microcontrollers, I used to write GLCD libraries in C . This is an HMI I designed using Touch-screen, GLCD, and 2x 8-bit microcontrollers.