Within this book the fundamental concepts associated with the topic of Power electronic control are covered alongside the latest equipment and devices, new application areas and associated computer-assisted methods.
*A practical guide to the control of reactive power systems
*Ideal for postgraduate and professional courses
*Covers the latest equipment and computer-aided analysis
Power electronics is one of modern and key technologies in Electrical and
Electronics Engineering for green power, sustainable energy systems, and smart
grids. Especially, the transformation of existing electric power systems into smart
grids is currently a global trend. The gradual increase of distributed generators in
smart grids indicates a wide and important role for Power electronic converters in
the electric power system, also with the increased use of Power electronics devices
(nonlinear loads) and motor loadings, low cost, low-loss and high-performance
shunt current quality compensators are highly demanded by power customers to
solve current quality problems caused by those loadings.
A power semiconductor module is basically a power circuit of different
materials assembled together using hybrid technology, such as semiconduc-
tor chip attachment, wire bonding, encapsulation, etc. The materials
involved cover a wide range from insulators, conductors, and semiconduc-
tors to organics and inorganics. Since these materials all behave differently
under various environmental, electrical, and thermal stresses, proper selec-
tion of these materials and the assembly processes are critical. In-depth
knowledge of the material properties and the processing techniques is there-
fore required to build a high-performance and highly reliable power module.
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With global drivers such as better energy
consumption, energy efficiency and reduction of
greenhouse gases, CO 2 emission reduction has become
key in every layer of the value chain. Power electronics
has definitely a role to play in these thrilling challenges.
From converters down to compound semiconductors,
innovation is leading to breakthrough technologies. Wide
BandGap, Power Module Packaging, growth of Electric
Vehicle market will game change the overall power
electronic industry and supply chain. In this presentation
we will review power electronics trends, from
technologies to markets.
GaN is an already well implanted semiconductor
technology, widely diffused in the LED optoelectronics
industry. For about 10 years, GaN devices have also been
developed for RF wireless applications where they can
replace Silicon transistors in some selected systems. That
incursion in the RF field has open the door to the power
switching capability in the lower frequency range and
thus to the Power electronic applications.
Compared to Silicon, GaN exhibits largely better figures
for most of the key specifications: Electric field, energy
gap, electron mobility and melting point. Intrinsically,
GaN could offer better performance than Silicon in
terms of: breakdown voltage, switching frequency and
Overall systems efficiency.
The idea of writing this book arose from the need to investigate the main principles of
modern Power electronic control strategies, using fuzzy logic and neural networks, for
research and teaching. Primarily, the book aims to be a quick learning guide for
postgraduate/undergraduate students or design engineers interested in learning the
fundamentals of modern control of drives and power systems in conjunction with the
powerful design methodology based on VHDL.
Manufacturers of electronic systems that require power
conversion are faced with the need for higher-density dc-to-dc
converters that perform more efficiently,
