Power Converters Coolant: Past, Present, Future, and a Path Toward Active Thermal Control in Electrified Ship Power Systems

Power converters have widespread applications in automotive, renewables, and power systems. The demand for power modules with low power consumption and high efficiency has increased due to advancements in semiconductor devices. So, power converters need to be highly efficient to reduce costs associated with energy dissipation and cooling requirements. This paper discusses various active thermal control methods for high-power power converters. It covers modulation and configuration techniques, ranging from single configurations to cascaded, modular, and multilevel converters. These concepts form the basis of power electronics building blocks, particularly relevant in all-electric ship systems. Power electronics building blocks represent a thriving technology that will advance ship power systems, the thermal design of which plays a crucial role in managing high heat dissipation levels. Hence, thermal management is essential for reliable device performance. The paper thoroughly studies different active thermal control methods and their impact on power semiconductor devices and converters, categorized per configurations, power routing methods, modulation, and control layers. The review then moves to thermal control methods for the PEBBs concept using multilevel converters in all-electric ship systems. The paper eventually outlines future research directions for the thermal aspect of power electronics building blocks

A Real-Time Prognostic-Based Control Framework for Hybrid Electric Vehicles

The increasing popularity of electric vehicles is driven by their compatibility with sustainable energy goals. However, the decline in the performance of energy storage systems, such as batteries, due to their degradation puts electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles at a disadvantage compared to traditional internal combustion engine vehicles. This paper presents a prognostic-based control framework for hybrid electric vehicles to reduce the cost of operating hybrid electric vehicles by considering the degradation of energy storage systems. The strategy utilizes a degradation forecasting model of electrical components to predict their degradation pattern and uses the prediction to control hybrid electric vehicles via their energy management systems to reduce the degradation of components. A real-time controller hardware-in-the-loop is set up to run the proposed strategy. An hybrid electric vehicle model is developed on Typhoon (i.e., a real-time simulator), which is connected to two layers, energy management and degradation forecasting layer, deployed in Raspberry Pis, respectively. All these components are communicated through CAN communication, where the actual operating condition of the vehicle is sent from Typhoon to each Raspberry Pis to implement the proposed control strategy. With this approach, the cost of operating hybrid electric vehicles can be reduced, making them more competitive than their combustion engine counterparts shown in both numerical simulations and the CHIL experiment