PEMD 2018

We are now back from the PEMD 2018 Conference and Exhibition which was held last week at the ACC in Liverpool. As expected we had warm welcome from the folks on the other side of the Pennines. Liverpool docks is a fantastic area to visit. Well worth a long weekend.  The event was well attended and we had plenty of interest in our stand showing the huge diverse range of power electronics we have been involved in.

The papers presented were on a very broad range of topics. For me one of the stand-out areas being looked at by Sheffield University was in the area of using piezoelectric devices as resonant electric transformers at lower powers. A transformer with no windings with power transferred by vibration!! There was also a very interesting tutorial discussion on which of the various power semiconductor technologies is the “best” at 600V. For sure that is an interesting battleground.

PLECS – We just added another seat

We have been big fans of Plexim’s PLECS simulation tool for power electronics for quite some time. We use it across most of our projects for component sizing, controls development and looking at system level behaviour. Our technical partner first came across it many years ago when it was still a free netlist-based basic tool provided by a university. Since then it has been fully commercialised and has come on in leaps and bounds. We have just added another seat of PLECS as we are so busy. This time we have decided to go for the standalone version which doesn’t require Matlab or Simulink. This version also has some additional features which we will no doubt find useful.