Tuesday, 08 October 2024 at Noon | 490 Cory Hall
Watch the seminar recordine here.
Professor Jessica Boles
Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences | University of California, Berkeley
Host: Jon Candelaria
ABSTRACT
As suppliers, converters, and controllers of electrical energy, power electronics are the lifeblood of many exciting emerging technologies in transportation, energy systems, manufacturing, healthcare, information technology, and more. However, while integrated circuits have seen miniaturization and expanded performance characterized by Moore’s Law, power electronics often remain the bulkiest, lossiest, and costliest components in the systems they serve. Miniaturization of power electronics is fundamentally bottlenecked by passive components, particularly magnetics (i.e., inductors and transformers), which have long been integral to power conversion but pose inherent size and performance challenges at small scales.
This talk explores how we can leverage an alternative passive component technology - piezoelectric components – to eliminate magnetics and unlock a new era of scalability for power electronics. Piezoelectrics offer numerous size, performance, and manufacturability advantages to power electronics, including energy densities three orders of magnitude greater than magnetics, but harnessing these advantages requires fundamental re-evaluation of both power electronic circuits and piezoelectric components themselves. To this end, I present the following recent advances: (1) A first set of dc-dc converter circuit topologies and control sequences capable of efficiently utilizing piezoelectrics as sole passive components; these converter implementations demonstrate the efficiency viability of piezoelectric-based power electronics and provide their highest experimental efficiencies to date (>99%). (2) A theoretical framework for evaluating piezoelectric materials and vibration modes for power electronics; this framework illuminates optimal piezoelectric component design requirements for power electronics and their associated scaling characteristics to small sizes. (3) An experimental demonstration of dramatic miniaturization offered by piezoelectrics; this prototype piezoelectric component has an order of magnitude lower volume than a magnetic component of similar capability.
These are important steps in realizing the scalability advantages of piezoelectrics in power electronics, positioning them to revolutionize what is possible for computing, wireless communication, robotics, biomedical devices, renewable energy, and beyond.
BIO
Jessica Boles is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and Co-Director of the recently launched Berkeley Power and Energy Center. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in electrical engineering. Her research area is power electronics, and her interests span power electronic components, circuits, control, and applications. She is currently pursuing a new class of power electronics based on piezoelectric passive components to enable major advances in the performance, size, and cost of power conversion for a wide variety of electronic and energy systems.
Boles is currently an ARPA-E IGNIITE Selectee and a UC Berkeley Presidential Chair Fellow. Her work has been recognized with two IEEE prize paper awards, the IEEE PELS Ph.D. Thesis Talk Award, and multiple prize presentation awards. She is a past recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the MIT Collamore-Rogers Fellowship, and the UT Knoxville Bodenheimer Fellowship. She is also a past recipient of the MIT EECS Department Head Special Recognition Award and the UT Knoxville Chancellor's Citation for Professional Promise.
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