Abstract: (Sponsored by PELS TC 1 and TC 6)
Power electronics are the lifeblood of many exciting emerging technologies in transportation, energy systems, manufacturing, healthcare, information technology, and more. These applications demand power electronics with ever-increasing efficiency and performance with ever-decreasing size and cost. While major advances along these dimensions have been enabled by wide-bandgap semiconductor devices and digital control, further advancement is now majorly bottlenecked by passive components, particularly magnetics (i.e., inductors and transformers). Magnetics have long been integral to power electronics, but they pose fundamental size and performance challenges at small scales that impede miniaturization.
This tutorial will introduce how we can leverage an alternative passive component technology – piezoelectric components – to unlock a new era of scalability for power electronics. Piezoelectrics offer numerous potential size, performance, and manufacturability advantages, but realizing these requires fundamental re-evaluation of both power electronic circuits and piezoelectric components themselves. Accordingly, this tutorial is intended to equip power electronics researchers and engineers with the basic understanding of piezoelectric components needed to leverage them in future power converter designs. Key concepts on piezoelectric materials, components, and how they may be utilized in power electronics will be covered.
