Kamal Al-Haddad
Biography
Kamal Al-Haddad has made pioneering contributions to the field of power electronics and has greatly advanced the technology through applications in a wide range of areas, including traction, power quality, lighting, induction heating, and telecommunications. He has consistently delivered high quality, reliability, and cost-effectiveness in the creation of commercially viable power solutions for the benefit of everyday society. His work on resonant power converters is used in the design of high-efficiency, high-density power supplies for telecommunications applications at Emerson, Canada. His work on the improvement of power quality was adopted by the Quebec Ministry of Transportation in the construction of a suburban electric-traction system for metropolitan Montreal. The North American Traction Division of Bombardier applied his techniques to its design of a 250-kW power converter for the monorail-traction system that now serves Jacksonville, Florida, USA. Al-Haddad’s advances in remedial strategy for electrical circuits have been applied to fly-by-wire aircraft engines. His power electronics components and structure-modeling techniques have been used in commercial software packages, in conjunction with MATLAB-Simulink in more than 1,700 universities, and thousands of industries worldwide. Especially significant have been Al-Haddad’s contributions to power quality and harmonic mitigation of power-distribution systems. His novel methodologies solved major industrial problems generated by harmonic propagation, and he designed and implemented the first active rectifier with active filtering capability and voltage harmonics correction. His innovations have had broad applications in power supplies for photovoltaic energy conversion systems, industrial lasers, discharge lamps, induction heating, and manufacturing. Al-Haddad’s work has spurred extensive new research by others, which has contributed to the rapid development of power quality, electrification for transportation, renewable energy, and distributed generation for society.
An IEEE Life Fellow, Al-Haddad is a professor and the senior Canada research chair, École de Technologie Superieure, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
