Laboratory for High Power Electronic Systems (HPE), ETH Zurich

The re­search at the Labora­tory for High Power Elec­tronic Sys­tems (HPE) fo­cusses on high power con­verter sys­tems in­clud­ing op­er­a­tion at me­dium voltages re­quired for ex­ample in fu­ture en­ergy dis­tri­bu­tion for re­new­able en­ergy sources or in trac­tion ap­plic­a­tions. A fur­ther re­search fo­cus is on solid state pulse mod­u­lator sys­tems for med­ical ap­plic­a­tions or ac­cel­er­at­ors (PSI, CERN). Based on an com­pre­hens­ive sci­entific ap­proach, fun­da­mental re­search chal­lenges are ad­ressed in the fol­low­ing main areas: - New me­dium voltage DC and AC con­verter con­cepts (E.g. Multi-level/-cell to­po­lo­gies, ad­vanced pack­aging, in­teg­rated thermal man­age­ment, etc). - Multi-domain mod­el­ling and op­tim­isa­tion of con­verter sys­tems (E.g. Pareto op­tim­isa­tion, sens­it­iv­ity ana­lysis, model or­der re­duc­tion, vir­tual pro­to­typ­ing, etc). - Ad­vanced pass­ives (E.g. in­teg­rated cool­ing con­cepts, in­teg­rated EMI fil­ter­ing, tran­si­ent mod­el­ling, etc). - Ultra-efficient and com­pact (in­teg­rated) elec­tric drive trains e.g. for elec­tric vehicles in­clud­ing a com­pre­hens­ive HF loss mod­el­ling of elec­tric ma­chines. - Solid state pulse power tech­no­logy (E.g. dir­ect mod­u­lator, hy­brid pulser sys­tems, pulse trans­formers, ul­tra pre­cise pulsers, etc). - Hardware-in-the-loop sim­u­la­tion sys­tems (E.g. Ul­tra high dy­namic ar­bit­rary AC and DC sources, con­trol con­cepts, etc). In the mod­ern and fully equipped labor­at­ory, the con­cepts pro­posed in the dif­fer­ent re­search areas are val­id­ated by pro­to­type sys­tems based on the latest tech­no­lo­gies.