ECE 590 I POWER & ENERGY SYSTEMS SEMINAR
WHEN: Monday, April 18, 2022, 4:00 – 4:50 p.m., Zoom Meeting, Meeting ID: 848 1899 8893, Password: power
SPEAKER: Dr. Kristen Booth, Assistant Professor, University of South Carolina
TITLE: "Magnetic Components: The Bottleneck of Power Electronics Design"
ABSTRACT: Magnetic components are the troublemakers of the power electronics field. They’re usually too large, too hot, or too heavy – or, generally, all three. It comes down to the taboo that is magnetics design and how little most power electronics engineers want to stray down that particular rabbit hole. So, we’ve decided to allow optimization to be our guide in the design process of magnetics. Unfortunately, design optimization creates new problems, like infeasibility and simulation-to-hardware response mismatches. What gives?
The answer is nothing. The real world has too few (no) assumptions to help us out on that front. If you can’t beat it – join it! This presentation will dive into the optimized world of a transformer design where we will study the effects of shifting from modeling to hardware implementation while diving into the minutia of what causes these issues to appear. Finally, a robust optimization method is introduced to the transformer design in order to reduce these tediums that irritate our design process. With this knowledge, power electronic designs can be better informed from the component-level up. By considering larger trade-offs at the converter- or system-levels based on this research, better power electronics designs can be implemented.
BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Kristen Booth is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina where she is researching the codesign of power electronics and power systems. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at The Ohio State University in the Center for High Performance Power Electronics (CHPPE). As an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, Dr. Booth completed her Ph.D. degree from North Carolina State University in 2019. She graduated from NCSU with an M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2017 and received a B.S.E. in Engineering Physics in 2015 from Murray State University. Dr. Booth’s research interests include resiliency and reliability of power electronics converters, AI-integrated power electronics, and digital twins for grid modernization and security.
