Portable Bicycle-Powered Refridgeration

Lack of access to viable, life-saving vaccines is a major public health problem worldwide. Our project objective is to create a feasible, frugal, and environmentally conscious transportation solution for vaccines. Our design for a bicycle-powered refrigeration system can function in both urban environments and rural areas with unreliable electricity and minimal infrastructure. This is enabled by integrating power generation from bicycle kinetic energy, thermoelectric cooling, voltage regulation, temperature control, and heat dissipation subsystems. The system is enclosed in solid housing to protect fragile vials against bumps and crashes and can be adapted to fit onto existing bicycle racks

Next generation electric drives for HEV/EV propulsion systems: Technology, trends and challenges

In recent decades, several factors such as environmental protection, fossil fuel scarcity, climate change and pollution have driven the research and development of a more clean and sustainable transport. In this context, several agencies and associations, such as the European Union H2020, the United States Council for Automotive Research (USCAR) and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia (UN ESCAP) have defined a set of quantitative and qualitative goals in terms of efficiency, reliability, power losses, power density and economical costs to be met by next generation hybrid and full electric vehicle (HEV/EV) drive systems. As a consequence, the automotive electric drives (which consists of the electric machine, power converter and their cooling systems) of future vehicles have to overcome a number of technological challenges in order to comply with the aforementioned technical objectives. In this context, this paper presents, for each component of the electric drive, a comprehensive review of the state of the art, current technologies, future trends and enabling technologies that will make possible next generation HEV/EVs.This work has been partially supported by the Department of Education, Linguistic Policy and Culture of the Basque Government within the fund for research groups of the Basque university system IT978-16, by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of Spain within the project DPI2014-53685-C2-2-R and FEDER funds and by the Government of the Basque Country within the research program ELKARTEK as the project KT4TRANS (KK-2015/00047 and KK-2016/00061), as well as by the program to support the specialization of Ph.D researchers at UPV/EHU ESPDOC16/25

Inverter Design for SiC-based Electric Drive Systems with Optimal Redundant States Control of Space Vector Modulation

The need for inverters with ever increasing power density and efficiency has recently become the driving factor for research in various fields. Increasing the operating voltage of the whole drive system and utilizing newly developed SiC power switches can contribute towards this goal. Higher operating voltage allows the design of drives with lower current, which leads to lower copper losses in cables and machine, while SiC switches can drastically increase the inverter efficiency. Offshore renewable power generation, such as tidal power, is a typical application where the increase of operating voltage can be highly beneficial. The ongoing electrification of transportation calls also for high power electric powertrains with high power density,where SiC technology has key advantages.In the first part of the thesis, suitable control schemes for inverters in synchronous machine drive systems are derived. A properly designed Maximum Power Point Tracking algorithm for kite-based tidal power systems is presented. The speed and torque of this new tidal power generation system varies periodically and the inverter control needs to be able to handle this variable power profile. Experimental verification of the developed control is conducted on a 35 kVA laboratory emulator of the tidal power generation unit.Electric drives using multilevel inverters are studied afterwards. Multilevel inverters use multiple low-voltage-rated switches and can operate at higher voltage than standard two-level inverters. The Neutral Point Clamped (NPC) converter is a commonly used multilevel inverter topology for medium voltage machine drives. However, the voltage balancing of its dc-side capacitors and the complexity of its control are still issues that have not been effectively solved. A new method for the optimal utilization of the redundant states in Space Vector pulse-width-Modulation (SVM) is proposed in this thesis in order to control its dc-link voltages. Experimental verification on a 4-kV-rated prototype medium-voltage PMSM drive with 5-level NPC converters is conducted in order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control technique.Low switching and conduction losses are typical characteristics of SiC switches that can be utilized to build inverters with high power density, due to the increased efficiency and smaller form-factor. Due to the above, SiC power modules have been particularly attractive for the automotive industry. The design approach of 2-level automotive inverters has been studied in this project. Moreover, a new design approach for the cooling system of automotive inverters has been developed in this thesis, which fine-tunes the inverter heatsink utilizing standard legislated test routines for electric vehicles. Multiple conjugate-heat-transfer (CHT) computation results showcase the iterative optimization procedure on a test-case 250 kW (450 A) automotive SiC inverter.Finally, the experimental testing of high power machine drives in order to verify the control and the hardware design is an important step of the development process. Thus, the performance of the prototype 450 A SiC 2-level inverter has been been experimentally validated in a power hardware-in-the-loop (P-HIL) set-up that emulates an automotive drive system. Several challenges have been addressed with respect to the accurate modelling of the motor and the control of the circulating power in the system. A new control technique utilizing the redundant states of the SVM has been developed for this set-up to effectively suppress the zero-sequence current to 3.3 % of the line current at rated power

DOMESTIC THERMOELECTRIC POWER GENERATOR

Due to being solid-state, maintenance free and noiseless, thermoelectric devices have found extensive applications in different areas since they were discovered over 180 years ago. The applications are concerned with power generation in industries utilities, transportation devices, medical service, space applications, military tools and environmental friendly refrigeration. The modules particularly attractive because it is utilize waste heat in varying applications. However, regardless of a few academic papers, there has not been extensive utilization in the domestic sector. The concept of this thermoelectric generator is proposed to highlight on using waste heat from the environment and generate the electricity for domestic application. The prototype that will be developed in the laboratory is especially design to be implemented on all other area where the waste heat can be obtain such as from the stove, barbeque set, home heater and even heat from the solar radiation. The scope of this project is comprises of energy harvesting from the waste heat for power generation, power management and power consumption for high AC system. The project is divided into two phase, the first phase is mainly on theoretical calculation for determining the number of TEG used for the system and identify the component require for power storage and conversion in order to supplying power to AC system. Experimental studies also will be carried out in order to identify the optimum power generation based on its temperature range and feasibility requirements. The collection of data compliment the second phase of the project which is the design process. During this phase, the design is develop from conceptual ideas into parametric design and finally fabrication process. The second phase of the project requires great consideration on various aspects such as product fabrication feasibility and materials

DC-DC Converter for Electric Vehicle

In this work, a DC-DC converter is designed for an electric vehicle. The DC-DC converter is designed to provide 500W with a 200-400V input and a 12-15V adjustable output. Electric vehicle sales are beginning to increase in popularity and the need for DC-DC converters to siphon power from the tractive system is not yet fully satisfied, especially for single-seater class vehicles. Additionally, improving performance in efficiency without sacrificing wide input voltage range can benefit future DC-DC converter designs. In the end, a forward active clamp DC-DC converter is designed and tested. Additionally, spreadsheet calculators, LTSpice simulations, and Matlab scripts were made to assist in work for the DC-DC

Multidisciplinary Cooling Design Tool for Electric Vehicle SiC Inverters Utilizing Transient 3D-CFD Computations

This paper proposes a new design tool that can be used for the development of a proper cooling component for high-power three-phase SiC module-packs for electric vehicles. Specifically, a multidisciplinary approach of the design process is presented that is based on the accurate electrical, thermal and fluid-mechanics modeling as well as computational testing of a high-power three-phase SiC modulepack under transient-load conditions, so that it can effectively meet the highly-demanding cooling requirements of an electric vehicle inverter. The cooling plate is initially designed by using steady-statebased 3D-computational-fluid-dynamic (CFD) tool, as in a conventional method. Then, the proposed design algorithm fine-tunes it through transient 3D-CFD computations by following a specific iterative improvement procedure considering the heat dissipation requirements for the SiC power switchesduring the official driving cycles for passenger vehicles and during abrupt acceleration tests under several ambient environments. Therefore, not only overheating at all operating conditions is avoided, but also, accurate thermal modeling of the individual inverter modules is provided that can be used forlifetime estimations and for calculating the overload capability of the inverter. The design improvement attained with the proposed procedure against the conventional steady-state approach is validated on a traction 450 A SiC inverter with the model of a real passenger vehicle

Prospects and Problems of Increasing the Automotive Thermoelectric Generators Efficiency

The chapter considers the current state and trends in the field of heat recovery units for vehicles with internal combustion engines (ICE), including thermoelectric generators for cars, motorcycles, ships and railway transport. Based on the analysis of literature data, mathematical modeling and experimental studies, this chapter presents various designs of such generators. This research considers a heat exchange between exhaust gas (EG) and thermoelectric modules (TEM), as well as how their usage affects ICE operation. Furthermore, the chapter profoundly explores the challenges of installing thermoelectric generator (TEG) on vehicle system. In addition, the ways of increasing overall system efficiency, by optimizing the flow channel and reducing electrical power losses, are presented

VEHICLE COMPARTMENTS ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROI SYSTEM USING SOLAR POWERED THERMOELECTRICS

The report was written to briefly introduce the Final Year Project entitled 'Vehicle Compartments Environmental Control System using solar Powered Thermoelectric'. The project will cover the research on thermoelectric and followed by a fully functioning prototype of a thermoelectric temperature regulator with test data. This project embarks on studying the feasibility of using thermoelectric to regulate the temperature inside the vehicle compartments

A Review and Analysis of the Effects of Colors of Light On the Performance of Solar Photovoltaic Panels

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