Professor Balog and Dr. Zhan Wang were awarded US Patent 10,790,799 on September 29, 2020 for their invention entitled “Systems and Methods for Determining Arc Events Using Wavelet Decomposition and Support Vector Machines.” The patented technology was developed through research supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. ECCS-1238412. This becomes the second technology in the patent portfolio developed by Dr. Balog and the REAPER lab pertaining to arc fault detection. The first patent, US 9,329,220, entitled “Method and System for Detecting Arc Faults and Flashes Using Wavelets.” was awarded in 2016.
Dr. Wang graduated with his Ph.D. from the REAPER lab, Texas A&M University, in December 2016; his dissertation was entitled “Arc Fault Detection in DC Photovoltaic Systems.” Prior to joining the REAPER lab, he received his B.Sc in Electrical Engineering – Electric Machines and Drives from Zhejiang University, China, in 2010.