Description
Power Electronics has become increasingly important in recent years due to the growing demand for energy-efficient systems and renewable energy sources. The research activity in this field deals with the study and the development of innovative, eco-sustainable switching power converters allowing the spread of solutions that will help the energy transition to occur and the improvement of energy efficiency of power systems, increasing their reliability, possibly leading to the development of breakthrough applications. The goal is to design converters that should be autonomous, as compact as possible and with smart control strategies so as to enable energy management capabilities. The research activity covers all the aspects of the converter design, starting from theoretical analysis, computational methods, control, circuital simulations, physical implementation and experimental validation.
Narrowing the scope to (integrated) switching power converters (either resonant or not), many aspects that have been typically considered secondary are becoming increasingly important. An example is the ElectroMagnetic Compatibility of a converter, as mandatory international regulations require that the emitting power spectrum of any converter has to be lower than a predetermined level. This research activity includes many advanced topics such as the spread spectrum clocking (i.e., reducing the emission of a switching power converters by the introduction of a controlled jitter in its clock), the parasitic estimation of a converter by means of electromagnetic simulations, the exact, semi-analytic design of resonant converter (that are typically designed using strong simplifying assumptions), the primary-side control of the energy transmitted by a wireless power transfer system (without any telemetry from the secondary side), and the computation of the linear small-signal equivalent model for a switching DC-DC converter.
ERC sectors
- PE7_2 Electrical engineering: power components and/or systems
- PE7_4 (Micro- and nano-) systems engineering
- PE7_5 (Micro- and nano-) electronic, optoelectronic and photonic components
- PE7_11 Components and systems for applications (in e.g. medicine, biology, environment)
- PE7_12 Electrical energy production, distribution, applications