About the Project
Applications are invited for a PhD studentship, to be undertaken at Imperial College London (Control and Power Group, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering). The position offers a unique opportunity to explore the cutting-edge intersection of network science and artificial intelligence, with the broad goal to investigate and optimise power infrastructure.
The project will be supervised by Dr. Homayoun Hamedmoghadam (ICRF Fellow, Imperial College London) and Prof. Tim Green (Professor of Electrical Power Engineering, Imperial College London).
Summary of Project:
Power grids are undergoing a major transformation with the full conversion to renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, and batteries. These resources interface with the grid through electronic inverters, fundamentally altering their grid role to the conventional power plants. Therefore, the contemporary foundations that have long underpinned the operation of power grids, may no longer be valid with high penetration of renewable resources—despite the ever-increasing societal and economic importance of power systems. The research in this project pertains to the design, expansion, and control of the modern power systems with the aim of ensuring the reliable operation in the net-zero era. The central vision is to empower the theory-rich Network Science framework with Artificial Intelligence to bring fresh insights into the architecture of renewable-integrated power systems.
A key objective is to identify minimal yet high-impact network interventions, such as targeted structural modifications, control placements, or operational adjustments, enabling a principled rethinking of how power networks should be designed and/or upgraded. From a network science perspective, the ability to pinpoint interventions with maximal benefit is highly sought after and can reveal new principles of emergent functionality in complex interconnected systems. The research seeks solutions that consequently minimise the cost of infrastructure improvements while maximising the security of operation, delivering tangible societal and economic benefits.
Within this project, the PhD student will develop synergistic methodologies combining network and power systems theory with AI, with the goal of optimizing existing grids and devising robust strategies for system upgrade and expansion under increasing renewables penetration. The PhD student will be expected to:
Undertake a literature review on network science analytics of power system stability, the impact of the net-zero transition, structural interventions for controlling network dynamics, and so on.
Analyse the dynamical effects of renewables integration, with emphasis on desynchronization phenomena, instability mechanisms, and cascading failure events.
Develop theory and tools to address fundamental questions pertaining to network upgrade and restructuring for resilience reinforcement.
Tailor AI pipelines, grounding the learning of power system dynamics in physical reality and network science interpretation of system properties, to address the identified challenges.
Duties and responsibilities
The responsibilities include studying the relevant literature, defining the research problems based on the project descriptions, conducting independent research, regularly reporting progress and results in both oral and written format, collaborating with other team-members, and writing reports/papers of the research outcomes when appropriate. The successful candidate will be based at the Control and Power Group in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London.