I volunteer at Lowell Makes, a local non-profit MakerSpace, as an Electronics Co-captain. We had a couple of old oscilloscope units lying around and we decided to use them as scope music display units. Oscilloscope music is a music file specifically designed to be displayed on a regular oscilloscope. The music is written in a …
A good fraction of my theoretical research is on the design of semiconductor devices (primarily heterostructure solar cells, HBTs, HEMTs, and FETs). It was, however, critical for me to be familiar with the device manufacturing steps as well to be able to account for them in my designs. Moreover, manufacturing limitations and practical deviations from …
During Summer break, I got a chance to make some liquid art in ProTvorchestvo art studio in Almaty, Kazakhstan. I later converted that art piece into a watch face with some of the shelf watch mechanisms. I think it turned out grear!
I had an idea for a solar tracker system that has two axes controlled by a single motor. It looked great on paper but a major flop in reality. I made pretty significant mechanical simplifications in my design which accumulated into an unstable (yet somewhat working) structure. I designed and manufactured the mechanical system myself, …
My adviser and I partnered up with UML’s Plastics Engineering department to work on the new design of a light-weight solar panel. Following are some excerpts of our previously published works: PV solar energy’s initial investment is affected by shipping, handling, and operating costs. These are directly related to solar panel’s weight, frame structure strength, …
Our team at AETC came up with a solar panel defrosting system using the solar cell itself as a heating element. After further research we found out that similar approaches were already patented in 2015. We then further simplified our system to aim for a reduced cost due to distributed converter system. Our experiments showed …
Our project was featured in Lowell Sun, a local newspaper: “The most recent alliance involved students from both schools designing and constructing the solar-electric lawn tractor. With their UML mentors, Nashoba Tech students developed concept sketches, prototypes and 3-D model.” This was a joint project between UMass Lowell and Nashoba Valley Technical High School initiated …
UMass Lowell offers an Industrial Capstone Project opportunity for their senior students, where they partner up with companies from their industries to work on the real-life engineering projects. (Joke: what is the difference between theory and practice? In theory, there is no difference …). Our team worked with MACOM, on a thermal model of their …
GaN HEMT Thermal Model (Capstone Project with MACOM) Read More »
Along with Harsha, Oliver, and Prof. Mil’shtein, I co-authored a manuscript on “Non-Graded Base Si/Ge Heterojunction Transistor“. The objective of this design was to utilize the carrier mobility advantages of a pure-Ge base transistor over Si or SiGe alternatives. Lattice matching of Si and Ge materials added an additional complexity to the model. I was …
As a part of my research, I worked on several new solar cell designs that consist of a-Si/c-Si or CdS/CdSe heterojunctions with p-i-i-n configuration, as well as a cascaded a-Si/c-Si with p-i-n-n-i-p configuration. The following is an excerpt from my doctoral dissertation: Multigap solar cells such as tandem and cascaded architectures are more efficient energy …