Acknowledgements

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Prof. Ned Mohan for giving me the opportunity to do this doctoral research, his invaluable guidance, constant motivation and encouragement, continuous support and faith on me, especially during the tough times and for providing a wonderful work environment and research group to complete this dissertation. He has always been an inspiration for me. I would like to thank Prof. Robbins for agreeing to be the chairman of the exami-nation committee. My sincere thanks to Professor Wollenberg and Prof. Panos Stinis for agreeing to be in the examination committee. I am thankful to Dr. Krushna Mohapatra for his guidance during the first two years of my PhD. A big thanks to Srikant for his great help in building the experimental setup. Thanks to Kaushik, Rohit, Shankar, Tamil and Vishweshwar for building the modular power electronics system which I used to build the experimental setup. I also want to thank all my colleagues for the countless technical discussions, creating a learning environment in the lab and making my stay here memorable. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support given by the Office of Naval Researc