Third-year electrical engineering student Di Ren is taking on research related to power control in welding.

Edmonton—Sometimes students discover what interests them in the strangest places. For third-year electrical engineering student Di Ren, that place was a lab she would have never otherwise known existed had she not been leading tours during Engineering Expo and Open House.

“I was volunteering for Open House and Engineering Expo as a tour guide,” Ren said. “Dr. [Patricio] Mendez’s welding lab was one of our stops and I was interested in what they were doing, so I started asking if he’d take on an electrical engineering student, and he agreed.”

Ren applied for the Dean’s Research Award program—which gives undergraduate students practical research experience as well as a modest financial award—to work in the material engineering professor’s lab. She was accepted for the winter semester and has just started the program.

In the welding lab, Ren will be exploring the dynamic and static output characteristics of welding power supplies.

“When you watch someone using an arc welder, the output looks very stable, but there's something doing the work to make it stable,” she said. “You need a stable current for arc welding, so you use a transformer and inverter power supply to convert voltage to current. But the output of voltage to current isn't linear, it's a curve, so you have to find ways to make it stable. I want to research ways to improve the conversion process; to make it more stable and more efficient.

“I find it interesting as an electrical engineer because in our labs we play with voltage. You’re given a set number of tools and you’re required to find a proper output. But with welding it’s all about the current. So getting to play around with current really interested me.”

On the surface it seemed like a good fit for an ECE student. But Ren is actually the only electrical engineer in welding lab; the other students are from materials engineering.

While a bit daunting at first, Ren said she quickly became comfortable thanks to support from Mendez’s and her new colleagues.

“Dr. Mendez is really friendly and open to me finding a project that interested me, and everyone else has been joking that I’m the only one in the lab that knows anything about transistors, so hopefully I can teach them something.”

Though Ren will be working on her own projects much of time, she’s aware of the value of the interdisciplinary approach to engineering projects and working with people outside your own field.

“It’s very important for engineers today to have diverse skills and to know how different disciplines work with each other,” she explained. “I’m definitely already seeing that in the welding lab.”

Ren’s project will last a year, but it’s a first step in what she hopes will become a longer-term focus on research. She plans to focus on power engineering in her fourth year of studies and then hopefully continue on to grad school.

“There are grad students in the lab, so getting to work with them gives me insight into what it's like to do graduate studies. It’s a great starting point for the direction I want to go.”