Biography

Professor Dougal leads the Power and Energy Systems research group, where research principally focuses on power electronics but it also encompasses a wide range of associated technologies across a number of engineering departments. Dr. Dougal is a member of the Board of Directors of the Electric Ship Research and Development Consortium (ESRDC), and in that capacity he oversees USC's activities related to new power generation, processing, and distribution technologies for ships, and coordination of those activities with other member schools. Prof. Dougal is also Site Director of the new NSF-sponsored Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Grid-connected Advanced Power Electronic Systems (GRAPES). This joint project between USC and the University of Arkansas seeks to insert greater levels of advanced power electronics into the utility power grid to better realize a Smart Grid. Since 1996, under sponsorship of the Office of Naval Research, Prof Dougal has overseen development of the Virtual Test Bed software, which is a comprehensive simulation and virtual prototyping environment for multidisciplinary dynamic systems. This environment is applied in studies of electric systems for navy ships, electrochemical power sources, hybrid power sources, power electronics, and controls.
Dr. Dougal currently supervises about a dozen graduate students, several post-doctoral scholars and research faculty, and a number of undergraduate researchers.

Research Interests

• Power conversion and storage in fuel cells, batteries, and capacitors
• Power routing and control in microgrids and renewable energy systems
• Power electronic implementations of Smart Grid concepts
• Modeling and simulation methods for integrated electrical, thermal, mechanical, and fluid systems
• The application of computer gaming methods in engineering design environments
• High-speed, distributed, multirate, hardware-interactive simulation environments
• DC power systems, including power routing, reconfiguration, protection, and control

Education

• Ph.D., Texas Tech University, 1983

Representative Publications

• Catching it Early: Modeling and Simulating distributed systems in early stage design. Roger A Dougal, Blake Langland, Marine Technology, pp 63-69, Jan 2016
• Novel unity-gain Frequency Tracking Control of Series–Series Resonant Converter to Improve Efficiency and Receiver Positioning Flexibility in Wireless Charging of Portable Electronics, I.I. Nam, R.A. Dougal, E. Santi, IEEE Trans on Industry Applications, Vol 51, No 1, pp 385-397, 2015.
• Tieline reconnection of microgrids using controllable variable reactors, Y. Zhang, R.A. Dougal, H. Zheng, IEEE Trans on Industry Applications, Vol 50, No 4, pp 2798-2806, 2014.
• Soft reclosing of an industrial network using an inverter-controlled energy storage system, A. Anwar, Y. Zhang, C.W. Brice, R.A. Dougal, IEEE Trans on Power Delivery, Vol 29, No 3, pp 1111-1119, June 2014.
• Latency Based Approach to the Simulation of Large Power Electronics Systems, A. Benigni, A. Monti, R. Dougal, IEEE Trans on Power Electronics, Vol 29, No 6, pp 3201-3213, June 2014
• A Coordinating Algorithm for Dispatching Regulation Services Between Slow and Fast Power Regulating Resources, C. Jin, N. Lu, S. Lu, Y.V. Makarov, R.A. Dougal, IEEE Trans on Smart Grid, Vol 5, No 2, pp 1043-1050, 2014.
• New Horizons in DC Shipboard Power Systems: New fault protection strategies are essential to the adoption of dc power systems, P. Cairoli, R.A. Dougal, IEEE Electrification, Vol 1, No. 2, pp 38-45, Dec 2013.
• Coordinated control of the bus tie switches and power supply converters for fault protection in dc microgrids, P. Cairoli, I. Kondratiev, and R. A. Dougal, IEEE Trans on Power Electronics, Vol 28, No 4, pp 2037-2047, April 2013.
• Design and Application of Surface Wave Sensors for Nonintrusive Power Line Fault Detection, M.N. Alam, R.H. Bhuiyan, R.A. Dougal, M. Ali, IEEE Sensors Journal, Vol 13, No 1, pp 339-347, Jan 2013
• Efficient Harmonic Filter Allocation in an Industrial Distribution System,  P. E. C. Stone.; J.J. Wang; Y.J. Shin, R. A Dougal IEEE Trans on Industrial Electronics, Vol 59, No. 2, pp 740-751,  Feb 2012
• Novel Dual-FCL Connection for Adding Distributed Generation to a Power Distribution Utility, Y. Zhang, R.A. Dougal, IEEE Trans on Applied Superconductivity, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp: 2179-2183, 2011
• Soft-synchronization of generators using controllable inductive fault current limiters, Y. Zhang, R.A. Dougal, IEE Trans on Power Delivery, Vol 26, No 4, pp 2428-2435, Oct 2011.