CAREER: Unified Design Framework for Advanced Power Electronics

摘要在现代科技时代，电力电子无处不在。它们使电池供电的移动电子产品、节能照明、高性能电动汽车、可再生能源、先进医疗技术和智能家居中的高产计算能力成为可能。到2030年，美国80%的电力将通过至少一个电源转换器进行处理。在消费者应用程序中，电源通常通过五个或更多功能不同的转换器进行处理，每个转换器都是为目标应用程序单独设计的。元器件技术、电路拓扑和控制方案的快速发展使许多应用能够实现高性能和高效率，但需要相当多的设计努力才能实现。本研究的目标是开发必要的基础知识和集中资源，以弥合当前功率转换技术设计方法与真正的正式设计优化技术之间的差距。为了推广电力转换设计和应用的新方法，该项目将研究计划与教育发展相结合，旨在扩大参与范围并有效培养下一代电力电子工程师。研究成果将纳入研究生和本科阶段的课程，并纳入大学前的推广和工程发现活动。在各个层次上，教育项目都强调以实践设计为导向的体验，以吸引参与者。高性能电力电子的设计是非线性、近似、直觉和原型/修订周期的复杂相互作用。由于设计和性能空间的固有复杂性，优化的尝试受到限制。前者是高约束的，包含连续和离散，有序和无序的维度。后者是多目标且高度非凸的。该项目推进了转换器分析和建模的最新技术，促进了正式设计优化技术的应用，从而提高了设计能力和可实现的性能。该方法利用了从非线性元件建模、降阶转换器建模和电源转换器开关分析技术中发展出来的框架。通过整合这些努力，同时创建一个开源特性存储库，开发的技术将允许计算效率和高度精确的电源转换器设计和建模，显着推进该领域的状态。结果将是一个新的分析框架，允许设计人员快速选择拓扑、工作模式、半导体和无源器件以及开关功能，从而在给定应用中实现最大性能。该框架的开发是为了保持设计师的参与，允许更短的设计周期，同时提供工具，允许更高水平的可实现的设计优化。

ABSTRACTPower electronics are ubiquitous in the modern technological age. They enable battery-powered mobile electronics, energy-efficient lighting, high-performance electric vehicles, renewable energy, advanced medical technologies, and prolific computational power in the smart home. By 2030, 80% of all electricity in the United States will be processed through at least one power converter. In consumer applications, power is often processed through five or more functionally disparate converters, each of which is individually designed for the target application. Rapid advances in constituent technologies, circuit topologies, and control schemes have enabled high-performance and high-efficiency in many applications, but require considerable dedication of design effort to achieve. The goal of this research is to develop the fundamental knowledge and centralized resources necessary to bridge the gap between current approaches to the design of power conversion technologies and true, formal design optimization techniques. In order to promulgate new approaches to the design and application of power conversion, the project integrates the research program with education developments that seek to broaden participation and effectively train the future generation of power electronics engineers. Research products will be incorporated into the curriculum at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and into pre-college outreach and engineering discovery events. At all levels, the education program emphasized hands-on design-oriented experiences to engage participants.The design of high-performance power electronics is a complex interplay of nonlinearities, approximations, intuition, and prototype/revision cycles. Attempts at optimization are limited due to the inherent complexity of the design and performance spaces. The former is high constrained, containing both continuous and discrete, ordered and unordered dimensions. The latter is multi-objective and highly non-convex. This project advances the state-of-the art in converter analysis and modeling, facilitating the application of formal design optimization techniques for greater design capabilities and achievable performance. The approach leverages a framework developed from techniques in nonlinear element modeling, reduced-order converter modeling, and switching analysis of power converters. By integrating these efforts, while creating an open-source characterization repository, the developed techniques will allow computationally efficient and highly accurate design and modeling of power converters, significantly advancing the state of the field. The result will be a new analytical framework that allows designers to rapidly select topology, operating mode, semiconductor and passive devices, and switching functions which will achieve maximal performance in a given application. The framework is developed to retain designer engagement, allowing for shorter design cycles, while providing the tools to allow a greater level of achievable design optimization.