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Job Postings

Current open positions are described below.  To learn more, review the full list of requirements and to apply, please click the corresponding links.

Postdoctoral Scholar | Job #JPF02580 | Job Posted: 11/03/2020 | Status: OPEN
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The Center for Energy Research will hire two postdoctoral scholars for an industry-sponsored project to promote renewable energy microgrids for operations in remote areas. The project is a collaboration between UC San Diego, Sandia National Lab, and Penn State University. The microgrids integrate high penetrations of solar PV along with electrical energy storage and load electrification. There is also thermal load which must also be served from renewables in combination with thermal storage. These systems must operate with extremely high reliability and meet economic criteria.
  1. Position 1: Solar Energy Variability
    While power system operation occurs on time scales of seconds, solar resource data is typically only available every 15 minutes or longer and over spatial scales of a few km. The postdoc would develop physically-based downscaling and upscaling models for satellite solar resource data to create multi-year output timeseries of solar power plants of 10 to 100s of MW. Characterization of solar variability and integration into power systems or microgrid modeling will then inform renewable microgrid system design and economics. For an example of a related model see the Wavelet Variability Model.
  2. Position 2: Unit Commitment, Model-Predictive Control
    The postdoc will develop approaches for microgrid techno-economic modeling at high temporal resolution (1 minute or less) over one representative year (8760 hours). Microgrid resource (storage, solar, gas generators) sizing and dispatch is a computationally intensive optimization problem and is usually performed only for hourly data and for representative periods. The postdoc will develop approaches to accelerate unit commitment problems using advanced optimization techniques and data selection techniques. For an example of a relevant microgrid sizing and dispatch model, see DER-CAM. The dispatch model then need to be integrated into a model predictive controls framework to simulate microgrid operation. 

Postdoctoral Scholar | Job #JPF02550 | Job Posted: 10/01/2020 | Status: OPEN
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The Center for Energy Research is currently recruiting a postdoc with a focus on experimental research on plasma-wall interactions. The main experimental duty will be assisting with the set up and operation of an experimental test stand to simulate slurry flow and also experimentally simulate high heat flux exposure of the dried slurry as a plasma-facing wall component. The scientific focus will be on the development of a high heat flux-handling, disintegrating, ceramic-based plasma-facing conglomerate which can serve as the basis for a renewable low-Z first wall system with tritium recovery in future magnetic fusion based power reactors. The work will be in collaboration with other scientists and technical staff at the UCSD CER. Numerical work on simulating neutron damage on the proposed ceramic, in collaboration with Idaho National Lab, may also be a part of this project.