The Department of Industrial Automation, which belongs to the School of Electrical Engineering of Xi'an Jiaotong University, was founded in 1952 and is also one of the first three universities in China to establish this major. In 1957, the Department was relocated to Xi’an. In 1981, the second-level discipline of Control Theory and Control Engineering was granted the right to confer doctoral and master's degrees, and in 1986, the second-level discipline of Power Electronics and Power Transmission was granted the right to confer master's degrees. In 1997, after the discipline of electrical engineering became the first batch of first-level disciplines that can cultivate and confer doctoral degrees, the discipline of power electronics and power transmission has granted the rights to confer doctoral degrees.

The Department covers 2 majors. One is power electronics and power drives. The research fields are: the basic theory of power quality and power quality control technology, wide bandgap power semiconductor devices, packaging integration and its application, novel switches’ topology theory and high-precision power control technology, microgrid new energy grid connection interface technology and its system stability analysis, power electronic devices and equipment reliability analysis and life assessment, DC distribution grid equipment and quality power supply technology, wireless energy transmission technology, etc. The other one is control theory and control engineering. The research fields are: Optimized energy-saving control of large energy-consuming equipment (systems), information fusion and data mining technology, modeling and applications of complex network systems. These 2 majors play a fundamental and supporting role for many secondary disciplines in the School of Electrical Engineering, and they have formed a certain academic influence in the world.

In the past 10 years, through the national “211 Project” and “985 Project” construction, we have established 5 specialized laboratories and 10 joint laboratories with famous enterprises at home and abroad, with a total investment of millions of dollars. There are 11 professors and 14 associate professors (including 13 doctoral supervisors), 5 assistant professors, 1 senior engineer and 3 engineers. Prof. Jinjun Liu, Prof. Xu Yang and Prof. Laili Wang were selected for national talent projects, and a large number of your people were selected for “New Century Talents Project” and other projects. At the same time, several senior foreign experts are invited to take classes for students. We can enroll 20-30 doctoral students, more than 80 master students and more than 10 international students every year. In the past 40 years, we have cultivated a large number of outstanding academic leaders and young academic backbones. 1 professor was awarded IEEE Fellow, 2 professors hold important positions in IEEE Power Electronics Society, the teaching group of Power Electronics and New Energy Technology Research Center was awarded as a national teaching team in 2008, and it was selected as a Science and Technology Innovation Team in Shaanxi Province in 2018. 

Since 2000, more than 20 monographs and textbooks have been published, among which Power Electronics Technology has been published in 5 editions. Many textbooks have won awards at the national and provincial levels. Some of them have been selected as national planning textbooks for the “Eleventh Five-Year Plan” and “Twelfth Five-Year Plan”. They are widely used by more than 400 universities, with a cumulative circulation of nearly 2 million copies. In 2003, the course “Power Electronics Technology” was awarded the National-level Quality Courses, and in 2012, it was selected as the National-level Quality-Resources-Sharing Courses. In recent years, we have undertaken more than 10 national projects, including 973 projects, 863 projects, key projects of National Science and Technology Support Program, etc. and more than 200 international projects and projects from industry. In 2018, Prof. Jinjun Liu was approved to preside over one National Key Research and Development Program project as the chief scientist, which is by far the largest national research project in terms of investment in basic research on power electronics. In the past 5 years, more than 200 SCI-indexed papers and more than 500 EI-indexed papers were published, and more than 50 Chinese, European and American invention patents were granted. 3 projects were awarded National Science and Technology Progress Awards, many projects were award provincial and ministerial science and technology awards, as well as the IEEE Power Electronics Journal Best Paper Award in 2016 and 2019.

In 2020, all postgraduate students were relocated to the Western China Science & Technology Innovation Harbor (i-Harbor), and several advanced research platforms with a total area of over 5,000 m2 were established in i-Harbor.