The Department of Electrical and Electronics at Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal seeks to combine excellence in education and research in collaboration with industries and other organizations. Faculties, students and research scholars of the department are involved in applied research in various areas of electrical engineering, like Lighting & Energy Studies, Power Systems, Control Systems, Microelectronics, Microcontroller & Embedded Systems, Power Electronics & Drives to name a few.

Also, the department serves as an independent body for testing of lighting fixtures.

The department has collaborated with major companies to set up state-of-the-art laboratory and research facilities. “Advance Energy Systems Lab” is the outcome of one such collaboration with Schneider Electric to promote technical excellence in the field of electrical, electronics, software and control engineering.  A MoU was signed with Texas Instruments, India under its University Engagement Program for setting up Analog Lab and Embedded Systems Lab and also for conducting faculty development programs. A MoU was signed with SELCO under its University Engagement Program to promote technical research in providing energy efficient solutions to various sections of the society.

Research Highlights of the Department: 

• Department of Science & Technology (DST) has funded an ongoing research project titled “Test Workbench and Proof of Concept Prototype for Building Energy Efficiency Solutions”.  
• Studies have been done on non-invasive junction temperature measurement of LEDs, luminaire life prediction using both prognostic algorithms and lumen depreciation with color shift.
• Work has been undertaken in the area of Solid State Lighting (SSL) which includes controller design for color mixing of RGB LEDs for various lighting applications.
• The department has an active FPGA research group. This group has expertise in the parametric modelling and real-time active vibration control of a mechanical systems. Some of the notable work done by the group are
  • Studies on benefits of combined visual and thermal comforts on occupants as well as propose a new methodology to design reconfigurable computing systems.
  • Demonstration of how digital circuit optimization can be done based on Ant-Colony Optimization technique.
  • Demonstration of how volatility in financial derivatives, useful for option pricing can be predicted using a soft computing approach.
• The lighting research group is actively involved in studying and reporting different concepts of energy efficient artificial-light and daylight integrated schemes. The group has
  • Successfully completed a DST funded project on “Adaptive predictive lighting controllers for daylight-artificial Light integrated schemes”. An experimental set-up has been established to take forward the work by aspiring researchers.
• Another major research area of the department is in lighting control applications where using camera-based luminance data acquisition studies have been done on integrating sphere method of camera calibration
• In recent years, due to considerable increase in the number of generators connected to distribution networks, one major concern is the rise in steady-state voltage level of a distribution system. Study has been done by researchers in the department to show the coordinated voltage regulation of distribution system with distributed generators. 
• Researchers have designed and simulated photovoltaic and wind hybrid energy system in isolated mode of operation.
• Study was undertaken to simulate and control a DC/DC converter for a prototype of 3kW PV and 3.2kW PMSG based wind energy conversion system.