For the 11th time in a row, the Chair of Power Electronics organized the event "Power Girls & Boys Days" to motivate students in 5th and 6th grade for technical issues. Almost 60 children had applied for the popular event this time, so that the 30 participants had to be drawn. On the 26th and 27th of July it was time for the children to visit the Technical Faculty of the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel shortly before the start of the summer vacation.

The first morning the junior scientists spent with a theory unit. It started with an introduction to current, voltage and power. The following explanation about circuits, diodes and LEDs led to a lot of coversations. Subsequently, the children discussed the different types of renewable energy and watched the award-winning film "Solar Energy Special" by Armin Maiwald from the show “Sendung mit der Maus”. This showed the great motivation as well as the interest of the children to understand the facts profoundly. The acquired knowledge was then practically applied to build a small circuit. The "TicTac flashlight" was assembled by each child itself. Previously, there was a introduction to the soldering, in which each child should solder his initials with resistors on a breadboard.

In the next project, it was already much more difficult: a board should be self-contained by the children completely equipped with components and represent a flashing heart in the end. The children had to learn the filigree handling of the soldering iron and also pay attention to the polarization of the components.

The acquired knowledge about the solar cell could be applied on the second day in practice: each child tinkeder a snall windmill, whose engine is driven by a photovoltaic cell.

Surprisingly, the Power Kids were so enthusiastic that the large majority did not make use of the opportunity to play during the break, and instead they continued to work. "Sometimes we had to ask the children several times clearly to take a break for drinking, so that at the high summer temperatures of 33°C degrees no one tips over," smiles organizer Max Lutz of the Chair of Power Electronics.

However, in order not to leave out the playful part completely, an electrical wire game was built in the last project, which the children were allowed to design and shape completely themselves.

All in all, we are pleased about the positive response of the children and their parents, who also reached us by e-mail after the event. Nobody wanted to go back to school after two days. A big thank you goes to the sponsors WEB-Andresen, SH Netz, Nord Electronic Drive Systems, FT Cap, Siemens and the “Förderverein of the TF”, who supported the campaign with financial or material donations. We would like to express this gratitude on behalf of the children and their parents.

As part of a small ceremony, Prime Minister Daniel Günther officially presented the funding documents of the EU.SH project "MAUS - Mobile Autonomous Underwater System" to representatives of all involved project partners on June 5, 2019. The aim of the project is the realization of autonomous underwater vehicles ("made in SH") utilizing different construction methods, which support each other in a swarm. The project partners represent three universities (Kiel University of Applied Sciences, University of Lübeck, University of Kiel) and two local SMEs (SubCtech, emma technologies). The project manager, Prof. Sabah Badri-Höher, emphasized in her speech the importance of artificial intelligence, digitization, and underwater robotics for the state of Schleswig-Holstein - words that the Prime Minister sympathetically took up. The project partners thank the state government of Schleswig-Holstein for the vote of confidence and the motivation boost through the personal participation of the prime minister.

In the "KielFlex" project, engineers from Prof. Marco Liserre's Department of Power Electronics are investigating the efficient integration of charging stations, so-called pantographs, for electric buses. Together with the City of Kiel, the "Stadtwerke Kiel", the Kiel public transport companies, the Frauenhofer Institute in Magdeburg and the ABB technology group, the aim is to ensure that power peaks and unnecessary costs for additional infrastructure are avoided during implementation. By 2020, KVG plans to supply Kiel's public transport system with 36 fully electrical buses. In order to deal with this additional load on the power grid, the researchers from the Technical Faculty are already carrying out simulations on the high-performance computer so that every Kieler will continue to be reliably supplied with electricity in the future.

Unbreakable HEART: a reconfigurable and self-healing isolated dc/dc converter

The chair of power electronics of Prof. Marco Liserre was awarded with the prestigious “ERC Proof of Concept Grant” (150.000 €) for the U-Heart (Unbreakable-Highly Efficient and Reliable Transformer) project. Aim of the project is to investigate and equip the already robust dc/dc converter of the HEART project with additional fault tolerant as well as self-healing features. In contrast to competing approaches, U-HEART will utilize the flux coupling of a multi-winding transformer to avoid the expensive use of redundancies, which makes our approach more appealing for industry partners.

An integral part of U-HEART is to explore market opportunities and license out the intellectual property patented. During this process the PE team around Prof. Liserre will be supported by the WTSH Kiel, in particular Joachim Bergmann, with patent studies and markets surveys.

The Project money will be used to employ a full-time doctoral researcher to construct a fault tolerant U-HEART prototype. Other costs include patenting fees and travel expenses for product presentations at Hannover Messe etc.

We are glad to announce that Dr. Gitanjali Kolhatkar from the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, Varennes, Quebec, Canada has just received an Alexander-von-Humboldt fellowship to conduct further research on ferroelectric tunnel junctions and synchrotron based spectroscopy with Prof. Hermann Kohlstedt (Technical Faculty) and Prof. Kai Rossnagel (Math.-Nat. Faculty), respectively.

She will start her appointment in Kiel in November 2019, after joining a German course at the Goethe Institute, Frankfurt.

For his master thesis "Efficient Angle Estimation for 3D Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) Radar Applications" Maurice Hott is awarded with the “Argus“ price. The thesis deals with methods for interpolation of incomplete antenna arrays and innovative signal processing for high-resolution radar images. The master thesis was written under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Peter Adam Höher (CAU Kiel) and Prof. Dr. Jan Mietzner (HAW Hamburg) and was submitted at the Chair of Information and Coding Theory of the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel.

The prize has been awarded for 16 years. The award ceremony took place during the annual Professors' Day at HENSOLDT's Ulm site. Professors from renowned universities and colleges as well as experts from the company regularly use this platform to exchange knowledge. A jury of university professors and company experts selected six outstanding theses from numerous submissions.

The Idea Competition Schleswig-Holstein, organized by the Business Development and Technology Transfer Corporation of Schleswig-Holstein, takes place every two years and honors outstanding ideas which might be suitable for starting a business. It is the most prestigious contest of this type and competition is very high.

In this year's closing ceremony, minister of economy, Dr. Bernd Buchholz, and chairman of the Investment Bank Schleswig-Holstein, Erk Westermann-Lammers, awarded the first place to Alwin Reinhardt.

The Ph.D. student of Kiel University's Chair of Micrwave Engineering of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Michael Höft has developed a radar sensor which can measure the particle concentration, the particle speed and the particle sizes in aerosol streams such as smoke.

On this years IEEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS) in Philadelphia, the major conference of the IEEE MTT-S society, the University of Kiel’s Chair of Microwave Engineering published two papers.

As one of 25 finalists Alwin Reinhardt qualified for the Best Student Paper Competition with his topic “Remote Measurement of Particle Streams with a Multistatic Dual Frequency Millimeter Wave Radar Sensor“. In his research the Ph.D. student of Prof. Michael Höft developed a high frequency radar system which can detect and characterize industrial emissions (such as particulates) in real time. After a successful competition at the event Alwin Reinhardt was awarded with the 3rd place by the MTT-S scoiety of the IEEE!

Dr. habil. Martin Ziegler from the Chair of Nanoelectronics of the Faculty of Engineering (Kiel University) has been appointed for a W3 professorship for “Micro and nanoelectronics Systems” at the TU Ilmenau. Dr. Martin Ziegler recently accepted the offered professorship and will start his new position on July 1st 2018. His colleagues at the Institute for Electrical Engineering and Information Technology and the Institute of Material Science congratulate Dr. Martin Ziegler for this remarkable achievement. Although Dr. Martin Ziegler will leave Kiel University his fruitful scientific contribution within the DFG research Group entitled “Memristive Devices for Neural Systems” will continue and it is planned to tighten the ties between the TU Ilmenau and Kiel University in the future further.

At the 20th World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control, the Chair of Automatic Control received the Prize for the Best Interactive Paper. The presentation had two formats: a lecture/oral session and a interactive session.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Meurer, Dr. Alexander Schaum and M. Sc. Henning Weisbarth presented their Paper "Robust adaptive output-feedback tracking control for microalgae cultures" and got selected from 612 papers that were presented in the Interactive Paper category.

In the paper a feedforward-feedback control strategy for trajectory tracking of microalgae cultures is developed and experimentally evaluated.

Together with five other chairs/editors the DSS team organized a douple issue of IEEE's Signal Processing Magazine. The first of the two issues was published at the end of November 2016 and we were of course really proud of beeing part of the editing team (John Hansen, Kazuya Takeda, Sanjeev Naik, Mohan Trivedi, Gerhard Schmidt, and Yingying Chen) of this highly respected journal. The topic of the special issue is "Signal Processing for Smart Vehicle Technoloiges".
The second issue appeared in spring 2017.

The research on memristive devices and their application in neuromorphic systems has become one of the most exciting areas in solid state physics and electronic systems. The possibility to engineer interfaces on the atomic scale accompanied with a tremendous progress in the electronic and structural analytics has led to a gradually better matching of experimental results with theoretical predictions and thus, to the hope of discovery new and/or improved functional memory devices. Memristive devices exhibit a wealth of phenomena and attracted a considerable interest from both the fundamental and device relevant point of research.