Soutenance mémoire
The technical language barrier
Education professionals have confronted the technical language barrier for centuries. They found that education of individuals is more than just telling them about something. In their book “Telling Ain’t Training”, (Stolovitch et al., 2002) tell us that the information that we acquire is rarely turned into knowledge unless we already have similar concepts to relate to in our mind. In the most common learning process in adults, the links formed by new concepts in our memory need to be anchored to already-existing memories in order to be processed.12 This makes it very difficult for people with different backgrounds to educate each other as they are lacking common memories or ideas. The words and concepts used by the communicator (teacher) must be carefully chosen to trigger connections with the learner’s memories. This implies that to educate and motivate people to use power electronics converters in their work, the converters must be described using terms and examples commonly used by mechanical and chemical engineers instead of the typical electronics jargon that we use every day. As scientists, we take comfort in believing that since mathematics is a universal language, we can use it to communicate effectively with all our peers. Unfortunately, effective communication, even amongst technical people, requires more than exchanging equations and numerical results. Even when we agree on a specific communication language (such as English), every specialty has its own lexicon to express concepts that use the same mathematics. An example of this is a sinusoidal oscillation. The mechanical engineer will call it a vibration and use terms like inertia, spring constant, viscous dampener and Newton’s second law of motion, as shown in Equation 1.1.
The technical innovation
The innovation presented here is not as much a way to educate the community of product and process designers (OEMs) but a way of developing power electronics that can be used by the OEMs’ staff, and presenting it to them. It is easier to train a few power electronics engineers to use terms and concepts familiar to an OEM designer than it is to train tens of thousands of OEM designers to understand the details of power electronics. It is especially true that in this case, the power electronics engineers (us) are the ones trying to convince the OEM designers that our technology is beneficial to their work. The innovation is therefore making power electronics accessible to “the others”. While it is new to our field, a similar revolution has already taken place in the computer industry. In the early years (1940-60’s), someone basically needed a PhD in electronics or computer science in order to use a computer. Today, five-year-old (and even younger children) can do amazing things on a tablet. This wasn’t achieved by providing advanced training to toddlers, but by making computers simpler to use. Can this be repeated? Let’s see what our power electronics experts are doing to make our field more accessible to the masses. The IEEE Industry Applications Society (IAS) had a whole conference on this subject in 2004 in Italy (reference?). As always, many papers were presented and expert wisdom was shared. Blaabjerg et al. in their paper “The Future of Electronic Power Processing and Conversion” (2005) described how the field evolved over the years and where it was expected to go.
One of their points was that the demand was not so much for basic products and components but for whole systems solving complete problems. People didn’t want IGBT modules, inductors, and drivers; they wanted a whole battery charger that only needed to be plugged in the wall. This expert panel also foresaw a large demand for energy related applications and expected that many practical applications would develop over the next 25-30 years. Since the conference was held ten years ago, we can confirm that they were right and we are just at the beginning of the revolution. Many real applications are presently operating in solar, wind energy and electric vehicles. They also predicted a proliferation of standardized power supplies. This is yet to be seen on a general level, but it is true for the computer industry. You can now re-charge your telephone or tablet with any USB charger found lying around the house. It looks like the world is waiting for something similar in other applications. Finally, they predicted the use of intelligent controls to facilitate energy management. This too is not yet widely available for real life applications, but it is being worked on. Our own industrial experience corroborates the opinion of these researchers, motivating our effort to develop a power electronics solution as complete as possible, using a familiar interface for its operation.
The standard route Once the designers’ interface and needs are understood, the next step is to define what solution can solve as many problems as possible. A few researchers have published high level analyses of power converter topologies applicable to the most popular applications. Chakraborty and his colleagues (2009) provided an interesting analysis. They tell us that “[t]he integrated power electronics module (IPEM) based back-to-back converter topologies are found to be the most suitable interfaces that can operate with different DE [Distributed Energy] systems with small or no modifications” (page reference). This is important as they identified a flexible architecture that reinforces the IPEM concepts developed by many other researchers over the years. Like others before them, they also point out that a standardized interface, not only between the building blocks but with the users, is needed and challenges the IEEE to continue to work on it. They point out that “The concept of power electronics building blocks (PEBBs) provides a way to hardware standardization of power electronics systems” (page reference). Finally, they confirm that the standardisation of the interface between the different modules, both hardware and software, is a real challenge.
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Table des matières
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 WHAT SLOWS DOWN POWER ELECTRONICS ACCEPTANCE
1.1 The broken connection with potential users
1.2 Communicating with people of different technical backgrounds
1.2.1 The technical language barrier
1.2.2 Generating interest
1.3 The technical innovation
1.4 The standard route
1.5 The manufacturers’ building block route
CHAPTER 2 IDENTIFYING THE NEEDS
2.1 Hypothesis for product development
2.2 What does a complete power converter solution include?
2.3 How to produce an accessible presentation of the product?
2.4 How to provide instant gratification?
2.5 Which converter topology is suitable for many applications?
2.6 How to implement a reliable product with suitable protections?
CHAPTER 3 ONE STEP CLOSER TO THE COMPLETE SOLUTION
3.1 Designing for industrial applications
3.2 Converter capacity consideration
3.3 Converter physical size consideration
3.3.1 The active rectifier operation
3.3.2 The inverter operation
3.3.3 Integrating the rectifier and the inverter in a module, the I-Stack™
3.3.4 Component selection for the I-Stack
3.4 IGBT selection
3.5 Heatsink design
3.6 Capacitor bank with DC busbars design
3.7 Leakage inductance management
3.8 Mistake-proofing the equipment
3.9 Advanced converter protections
3.10 Long life design philosophy
3.11 Component life monitoring
3.12 Innovative capacitor bank life monitoring
3.13 Other component life monitoring techniques
3.14 Safety aspects of capacitor banks
3.15 Other safety aspects related to power converters
CHAPTER 4 SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT FOR THE I-STACK™
4.1 Software for everyone; the “Power PLC”
4.2 Graphical programming example
4.3 Diagnostic adapted for a wide audience
4.3.1 Remote diagnostic
4.3.2 Fault recording and analysis
4.3.3 Connectivity
4.3.4 Web Interface
CHAPTER 5 TOWARDS A COMPLETE SOLUTION
5.1 Presenting the I-Pack™.
CHAPTER 6 APPLICATION EXAMPLE
6.1 Ozone generator power supply
6.2 Legacy PSU technology
6.3 System improvements when using the I-Pack™
6.4 Details of the application
6.5 Alarms and faults for the ozone PSU
6.6 Final word on ozone PSU application
6.7 Flexibility for other applications
CONCLUSION
FUTURE WORK AND RECOMMENDATIONS
ANNEXE I
LIST OF BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES
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