An interdisciplinary team that included graduate student Dongmin Li from the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) earned first place at the prestigious IEEE Power Electronics Society 2025 MagNet Challenge, outpacing 39 teams from around the world.

Li worked alongside ISyE Assistant Professor Xiaochen Xian, Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Assistant Professor Baoyun Ge, ECE graduate students Piyush Chauhan and Yuanhao Mo, and Le Chang, an engineer from General Motors. The team was honored for its innovative approach to modeling magnetic systems, an area critical to the performance and efficiency of modern power electronics.

The MagNet Challenge tasks student teams with developing advanced software algorithms that learn from existing training data and accurately predict magnetic behavior in previously unseen materials and operating conditions. Competitors are evaluated on both modeling accuracy and robustness, with applications spanning electric vehicles, power converters, motors, and transformers.

Drawing on engineering principles in modeling, optimization, and data-informed decision-making, the team developed a physics‑informed prediction model based on mechanical analogies for magnetic systems. The approach allowed the model to explicitly capture complex nonlinear effects, including saturation, hysteresis, eddy currents, and displacement currents, that have long challenged engineers and researchers.

Their model significantly reduced prediction errors across five different testing materials, operating over a wide range of switching frequencies (from 50 kHz to 800 kHz) and temperatures between 25°C and 70°C, outperforming all other competitors.

The project spanned 10 months, beginning in March 2025, and reflects ISyE’s growing role in tackling complex, interdisciplinary engineering challenges through advanced modeling and data-driven methods. The team has since submitted two provisional patents related to the technology developed during the competition.

The award was formally presented at the IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference on March 24, 2026, in San Antonio, Texas. Hosted by Princeton University and Dartmouth College, the MagNet Challenge was sponsored by the IEEE Power Electronics Society along with industry leaders including Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Würth Elektronik, ITG Electronics, and pSemi.

For ISyE, the win highlights the impact of its students and faculty in shaping next-generation solutions at the intersection of systems engineering, computation, and emerging energy technologies.