Education

Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India July 2014 - May 2018

B.Tech in Electrical Engineering

Specialization in Embedded systems and VLSI

Work Experience

Indian Space Research Organization (3+ years) July 2018 - present

Power Processing Unit for Electric Propulsion

• Responsible for design, realization, qualification of Discharge Power Supply for All-Electric Propulsion System.

• Successfully ignited the 300mN Stationary Plasma Thruster for the first time in India (Team of 3 members.)

• Achieved world-class efficiency for Discharge Supply by employing ZVZCS (engineering model) [ η achieved = 93% (peak-96%), NASA’s Lunar Gateway PPU = 95%]

• Invented & Realized ”a Configurable Voltage-Scalable High-Power Soft-Switching Space-Grade DC-DC Converter ”, topology adopted for the high specific-impulse and large throttle range electric propulsion applications.

• Designing a high-frequency high power density LLC resonant converter by utilizing radiation-hardened GaNFET and digital isolators for next-generation space-borne systems.

• Realized a pressure regulator driver for propellant feed system of electric thruster and cold gas thruster.

• Developed an augmented checkout system in Python utilized Pandas for test-data post-processing, created a test result visualization dashboard using Altair library, a data-management web-app using Streamlit for enhanced Anomaly detection and failure instances management.

Stationary Plasma Thruster

• Identified and experimentally substantiated the zero external current requirements for BaO-W cathode of 300mN SPT resulted in one module reduction in PPU.

• Carried out a theoretical study for the effect of the harness impedance and thruster protection filter phase-angle on breathing mode oscillations to prevent the thruster quenching.

Publications & Patent

71st International Astronautical Congress, 2020

Vishal K. Meena and Kiran R., ”Ultra Low Power High Voltage Energy Starved Flyback Converter For Space Applications,” in Proceedings of 71st International Astronautical Congress 2020, IAC-20,C3,3,4,x57379.

IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems

(under peer review) Vishal K Meena and Manju Nair, ”ZVZCS Topology based High-Voltage High-Efficiency Discharge Supply for a 5kW Stationary Plasma Thruster,” IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems.

Patent (Indian + PCT)

Provisional patent application filed for ”Method and Apparatus for Voltage Scaling in a Zero-Voltage Zero-Current Switching DC-DC Converter”, Vishal K. Meena, Kiran R., and Manju Nair

Projects

Deep Learning

Fine-tuned and trained the Inception V3 Deep Convolutions Architecture for image captioning project and gained theoretical & hands-on experience on CNN, word-embedding, and LSTM.

CMOS Image Sensor - B.Tech Thesis

Designed a successive approximation TDC architecture and layout with a novel, temperature, parasitics insensitive sub-clk delay cell by employing path swapping and DLL.

Fun Projects & Hobby

Projects

Ultra-low-power 1cm resolution Level-sensor / flow sensor

IoT-based Smart vermiculture for rural areas

Hobby

Reading on Personality and Social Psychology, History of Science,

Mind Palace, Cycling, Home Decor, Blogging

Technical Skills

Cadence Virtuoso, Autodesk Inventor, Xilinix ISE, Libero IDE, PADS, CCS Studio, ModelSim, Matlab

VHDL, Verilog, C, C++, Python - OpenCV,

Tensor-flow & Keras framework, Pandas, Jupyter Notebook, Heroku, Streamlit, Matplotlib, Altair

Arduino IoT cloud Resberry Pi, FPGA, DSP - TMS320, Blynk