A Wide Bandgap Based Step-up Power Converter With Enhanced Self-Reconfigurability for Medium Voltage Renewable Power Network

Wind and solar photovoltaic energy are the fastest growing sources of electricity in Canada, targeting to reach 10% of Canada’s total generation by 2040. Aligned with Canada’s energy transition, this research aims at developing a novel, highly efficient, compact, and reliable power electronics interfaces for high power renewable energy resources. The use of power electronics converters is an attractive solution to significantly reduce the weight and size of the step-up voltage conversion unit in today’s high power renewable energy systems. However, the existing converters fail to maintain a stable grid voltage efficiently against a wide range of solar irradiation level or wind speed. To address this issue, a high frequency converter with four modes of operations is proposed that employs newly available high voltage wide bandgap (WBG) transistors. The structure of the proposed converter can be changed according to the atmospheric conditions by using a single switch. Hence, high efficiency for a wide range of solar irradiation level or wind speed can be obtained.

Faculty Supervisor:

John Lam

Student:

Mehdi Abbasi

Partner:

I-INC Foundation for Business Development

Discipline:

Engineering - computer / electrical

Sector:

Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

York University