College of Engineering faculty and students were part of the UMass Amherst research team that developed Sundown, a computer model for residential solar fault detection featured in a recent article in PV Magazine. 

Residential-scale solar systems lack sensing and instrumentation for performance monitoring and fault detection, as do larger utility-scale arrays, so these smaller solar arrays can often experience costly faults that go undetected for long periods. SunDown detects and classifies per...

Professor Qiangfei Xia of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department has received a three-year, $499,998 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support his pioneering project on near-sensor and in-sensor analog computing. As Xia says, his NSF research “aims at delivering intelligent and energy efficient wearable electronics that will become ubiquitous in the era of the Internet of Things.”

“The proposed project...

Assistant Professor Amir Arbabi of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department is the co-principal investigator for an initiative to advance scalable manufacturing processes that enable commercial fabrication of ultra-thin “metalenses” to help control light and remove imaging abnormalities in many electronic devices. The new processing would allow these high-performing optical wafers to be widely used in next-generation smartphone cameras, medical imaging devices, and many other applications. See...