Innovative High-Efficiency and High-Reliability Power Electronics Technologies for Renewable Energy Systems

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Increasing global warming and depleting fossil fuels have led to a growing interest in utilizing clean renewable energy. Canada has huge potential for renewable energy production. However, the integration of renewable energy into the power grid is challenging due to the cost, complexity and implementation of the necessary infrastructure, and the intermittent nature of renewable power production. Power electronics inverters are the enabling technology for the integration of renewable energy such as wind and solar energy into the power grid. However, a large portion of the renewable power is lost to heat in the power conversion stage due to inefficiencies of the power inverters. Therefore, research efforts are needed not only to increase renewable power production but to also decrease power losses with the new efficient power conversion systems, and to overcome the current technological barriers in power inverters such as high inverter sizes, high cost, low reliability, and low power density. The number of grid-connected non-linear loads such as electric vehicles when charging is continuously increasing. The intermittent nature of renewable power and the increasing number of non-linear loads severely affect the grid power quality. Therefore, research is required to develop advanced power inverters not only to integrate renewable power into the grid but to also mitigate grid power quality issues. The proposed research program will develop new ultra high-efficiency and high-reliability DC-AC inverter technologies with the latest Wide Band Gap (WBG) and Gallium Nitride (GaN) devices for renewable energy integration and grid power quality improvement. This research program will develop new non-isolated single-stage buck-boost DC-AC inverters to reduce the number of power processing stages, power losses, cost, and size; Develop new single-stage isolated DC-AC inverters to improve efficiency and power density; Improve the reliability of the proposed new inverters by eliminating shoot-through, and reduce the magnetic volume by integrating the magnetic components; and Develop digital control strategies for the proposed inverters to integrate renewable energy sources and mitigate the grid power quality issues. The proposed research program in the long terms will build and implement various prototypes of the new DC-AC inverters meeting the design and constraints of commercial products, and commercialize the developed inverter technologies to bring a broader societal impact. The findings and technological advancement from the proposed research will be shared with Canadian power electronics companies, power utilities, power engineers and researchers. The proposed research program will provide industry-driven training and collaboration opportunities for students in renewable energy integration and conversion. The students trained through this research program will become highly qualified engineers and technology leaders in the Canadian workforce.