Meet Akiko Kumada — Researching the future of power

My name is Akiko Kumada of the high-voltage laboratory at the University of Tokyo I graduated from the University of Tokyo 25 years ago And I worked in an electric power company for two years and after that I worked here The research in this lab is related to high voltage insulation high current interruption and very basic research on materials So for example to understand current interruption phenomena we have to know the fundamental characteristics of an arc discharge So we developed a temperature and electron density sensor to investigate the arc discharge whose temperature is very very high Nowadays, there is a big change in the power grid Because the existing power grid is operated as an AC system But nowadays have to introduce more renewable energies, wind and solar To introduce such renewable energy, it’s better to use DC technology so the power grid is being updated We are developing new diagnosis technology for aging power apparatus so we can guess the lifetime of such power apparatus And [talking about] insulation material, the insulation strength is determined by the weakest point I developed optical sensors for measuring internal phenomena of material such as partial discharge or branching trees The biggest challenge of our research is a correct understanding of high voltage phenomena, because it is easily influenced by the observation itself In this lab there are two professors (including me), one technician and around 10 students. It’s not a big laboratory but a very active [one] The students are very active some specialize in experiments and others specialize in numerical simulations They collaborate together with each other and sometimes they collaborate with industry I find research on high-voltage engineering very interesting interesting because high voltage phenomena is very complicated and it’s the basis of the power grid I hope our research can support the construction of an advanced power grid where more renewable energy is introduced .