About
One Consortium, Two Universities
AMPED is a partnership between the University of Pittsburgh and North Carolina State University. Pitt administers the consortium: it establishes and maintains memberships, distributes funds to the university partners, and provides administrative support, coordination, and communications. Both universities carry out coordinated student education and research activities, and industry and national laboratory partners work with the combined team through a single point of entry.
The two universities bring complementary strengths. Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering contributes magnetic materials synthesis and manufacturing, component characterization and standards, and the Energy GRID Institute, which includes a full-scale medium voltage testing laboratory (up to 13.8 kV and 5 MVA) at the Energy Innovation Center in downtown Pittsburgh, as well as the Electric Power Engineering and Engineering Science programs. NC State contributes the FREEDM Systems Center and the PowerAmerica Institute, a medium voltage high bay testing laboratory, high-speed motor test stands, solid-state transformer prototypes, and a power electronics program that has produced many leading experts in wide bandgap power conversion.
Our Story
AMPED began with a workforce problem. Electrification of transportation, the emergence of solid-state transformers as an alternative to conventional transformers, and the spread of renewable and distributed energy resources all depend on advanced magnetic materials and components. Yet research funding for this field had lagged for years, leaving a shortage of engineers and scientists trained across electrical engineering, physics, and materials science, three fields that rarely shared a classroom.
The foundation was laid in collaborations that began as early as 2011, woven together by a close-knit group of researchers. Richard Beddingfield, then a student at NC State and later a Ph.D. student of Subhashish Bhattacharya, began collaborating with Paul Ohodnicki, then at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), and Prof. Ohodnicki and Prof. Bhattacharya have been close colleagues and collaborators ever since. At Pitt, Brandon Grainger, then a student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, worked with Prof. Ohodnicki through the ARPA-E Solar ADEPT program. They also collaborated through the Grid Technologies Collaborative between Pitt and NETL and on a series of joint proposals before AMPED existed.
Prof. Ohodnicki also taught as an adjunct faculty member at Pitt, offering courses that supported the Electric Power Engineering program Prof. Grainger oversees, so the connection ran through the classroom as well as the laboratory. Dr. Beddingfield later conducted magnetic materials research at NETL as an ORISE postdoctoral fellow (2018–2020). Building on that decade of trust and shared results across the Pittsburgh region and NC State’s FREEDM and PowerAmerica centers, the faculty leads at Pitt and NC State formalized the consortium in 2020 with seed support from Pitt’s SEEDER and MOMENTUM grants.
The first step was to listen. The team engaged an original industry advisory group of 19 leaders from companies and government laboratories, including ABB, BAE Systems, Eaton, Metglas, NASA Glenn, the Naval Research Laboratory, Raytheon Technologies, Sandia National Laboratories, and Tesla. Their guidance shaped AMPED’s two guiding principles. The first is workforce development: investing in students and research for future hires, offering training for current employees, and building a pipeline of U.S. citizen students for defense and energy laboratories. The second is community building: giving universities, industry, and national laboratory partners a place to meet and raising the visibility of power magnetics needs.
Timeline
Key Events
From Collaboration to Consortium
2011
- Collaborations begin among Pittsburgh and NC State University
2020
- Pitt SEEDER and MOMENTUM Grants
- Original Industry Advisors Engaged
- Business Model Set
2021
- First Annual AMPED Workshop
- Industry-Supported Research Begins
2022
- NSF IUCRC Planning Grant
- 2nd Annual Workshop
2023
- Hillman Foundation $1.2M Grant
- Nanocrystalline Soft Magnetics Workshop
- 3rd Annual Workshop
2024
- ONR DURIP Award: Additive Manufacturing Lab
- 4th Annual Workshop
2025
- DOE Office of Electricity: Transformer Testbed
- ONR BAA Award
- Fifth Annual Workshop
2026
- First joint PSMA/AMPED Workshop
- 6th Annual Meeting
- Duquesne Light/CorePower Testbed
Diversified Funding
AMPED research and facilities have been supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (Advanced Manufacturing Office, Solar Energy Technologies Office, Vehicle Technologies Office, ARPA-E, and the Office of Electricity), the Department of Defense (Office of Naval Research and DARPA), NASA, the NSF, the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development (through the Manufacturing PA Innovation Program), the Hillman Family Foundation, and industry memberships and sponsorships.
Part of the Center for Energy
AMPED is a core center of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Energy. The relationship runs both ways. The Center gives AMPED a platform that connects it to Pitt’s other core centers, faculty across campus, the Energy Innovation Center laboratories, and partners such as the RETI Consortium. AMPED, in turn, demonstrates what a member-supported innovation ecosystem can accomplish, a model the Center hopes to extend.
AMPED and Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania is a national center of gravity for the materials and manufacturing that power magnetics depends on. The Commonwealth’s producers cover the full range of soft magnetic materials found in transformers, motors, and inductors:
- Bulk crystalline alloys, including electrical steels, Hiperco (iron-cobalt), and permalloys (iron-nickel-molybdenum): high power density, low frequency materials used in motors, generators, and conventional transformers.
- Amorphous and nanocrystalline alloys: medium power density, medium frequency materials for next-generation transformers (amorphous) and for motors and inductors (nanocrystalline).
- Ferrites, powder metal, and soft magnetic composites, for inductors and high-frequency applications.
Producers across the state include U.S. Steel, Cleveland-Cliffs, ATI, Carpenter Technology, Magnetics, CorePower Magnetics, MPP, Symmco, National Magnetics Group, HICO America, Hamilton Precision Metals, and Transformer Technologies. Electrical steels are now designated critical materials, and Pennsylvania is a national leader in producing them.
AMPED works with the Commonwealth to connect this manufacturing base with university research. The Manufacturing PA Innovation Program, funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED), brings Pennsylvania universities together with the state’s manufacturers. Its Manufacturing Fellows Initiative supports undergraduate and graduate student fellows who work with Pennsylvania manufacturers on industry-identified projects to advance new products and processes, with the goals of keeping Pennsylvania a national and international leader in manufacturing, creating high-paying manufacturing jobs, and linking Pennsylvania companies with talented students. The University of Pittsburgh is one of the institutions that helped launch the initiative. Through this program, AMPED researchers have partnered with Pennsylvania companies on projects that include:
- Hiperco laminations. Pitt, Carnegie Mellon University, and Carpenter Technology explored new processing methods and techniques for Hiperco laminations, used in high-performance motors, with intellectual property from the work being explored by Pitt.
- Rapid laser processing of nanocrystalline alloys. Pitt and CorePower Magnetics explored continuous-wave laser-based rapid processing of nanocrystalline alloy ribbon. A prototype was developed and the intellectual property developed at Pitt is being explored.
- Automated core characterization. Pitt and CorePower Magnetics developed a high-power, power-electronics-based system for characterizing magnetic cores, with a high level of automation and control for rapid in-situ testing.
Other Pennsylvania partners strengthen AMPED’s ties to the region. The Hillman Family Foundation supports AMPED’s workforce development and seed funding for national growth. Duquesne Light joins Pitt, NC State, and CorePower Magnetics in a new distribution transformer testbed project. Several Pennsylvania-area organizations also take part as AMPED industry participants and advisors.
As transformer demand grows with grid modernization and data center construction, AMPED aims to help ensure that the next generation of magnetic materials, components, and engineers is developed, tested, and, wherever possible, made in Pennsylvania.
