Power Electronics laboratory

Power electronics lab

The power electronics laboratory has two main purposes: research and collaboration with industry and educational activities. All of the information related with recent projects and research activities can be found in the power electronics group page. Here, you will find the main facilities of the laboratory which consists in three main parts:

  • Equipment and tools for design and developing general and power electronics
  • Equipment for testing prototypes
  • EMI/EMC equipment for testing and training
  • HV equipment for developing high voltage converters
  • Other facilities

 

 Equipment and tools for design and developing general and power electronics

Researchers and students uses standard software for simulations of power electronics including PLECS, Matlab and KiCad. After the designs are well simulated, they create the first prototypes in a printed circuit board (PCB). For that, the power electronics laboratory has milling machine LPKF E44. This powerful tool can print a two-layer PCB in minutes, it operates using a camera which allows a good alignment between the top and bottom layers. img_20210916_225955

 

img_20210916_230052 After the printed circuit board is finished, the researchers must clean it and protect it with special products to prevent oxidation and to facilitate the soldering process. The soldering process is done in the laboratory as well. There are two options: manual soldering or soldering by oven.dav
In addition, after the soldering process, it is very important to check if the board is ready to test. For that, a digital microscope is used. The device works as simple as a digital camera, where you can check each component on the board, take pictures and measure distances.After that, the PCB is ready to be tested. img_20211001_140159

Equipment for testing prototypes

The equipment for testing prototypes includes

  • High bandwidth oscilloscopes up to 350MHz,
  • Different voltage probes up to 1400V,
  • Current probes up to 500A and 100MHz,
  • Impedance meters,
  • Low voltage power supplies,
  • High power DC power supplies, up to 20kW/660V,
  • Thermal camera,
  • Arbitrary generators
  • True RMS multimeters
  • Spectrum analizers
  • RF signal generators
  • Acquisition units
  • Dissipative loads, transformers, auto transformers, etcimg_20210916_230039
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EMI/EMC equipment for testing and training

It can test conductive and radiated emissions. The testbench allows to train students and research in this important field. img_20211001_140322

HV equipment for developing high voltage converters

The high voltage facilities 10kV-10kW are ready to use, including the HV probes. However, in order to properly use the HV facilities, the laboratory is preparing a cage for installing the equipment inside, and the users ourside. img_20211001_135731

 

Shared facilities

vanadium Recently a Vanadium Redox Flow Battery was acquired by CEST in order to research on this technology. in relation to this an European project is conducted which will combine supercapacitors with Vanadium Redox Flow Batteries. The battery is installed in a thermal chamber where it can be tested at different temperatures.