Materials scientists can now use insight from a very common mineral and well-established earthquake and avalanche statistics to quantify how hostile environmental interactions may impact the degradation and failure of materials used for advanced solar panels, geological carbon sequestration and infrastructure such as buildings, roads and bridges.

    Researchers at Purdue University Indianapolis have developed a groundbreaking capacitorless solid-state power filter (SSPF) for DC-AC converters, addressing the limitations of traditional passive filtering methods. This innovative SSPF generates a sinusoidal AC voltage without capacitors, utilizing a planar transformer and a high-frequency H-bridge converter to inject voltage harmonics, resulting in minimal harmonic distortion. By eliminating capacitors, which are prone to failure, this design enhances the reliability and efficiency of power conversion systems, with potential applications in renewable energy, electric vehicles, and industrial automation.

    High-efficient isolated DC/DC converters with a high-efficiency synchronous reluctance generator (SRG) are the ultimate solutions in DC microgrid systems. The design and modeling of isolated DC/DC converters with the performance of SRG are carried out. Reactive and active powers are used as PWM control variables on the generator side. Further, the flux estimator is used. Three-phase pulse width modulation (PWM) rectifier is used by applying space vector modulation (SVM) with a constant switching frequency for direct power control. Further, the paper also includes the experimental validation of the results.

    The paper also proposes that highly efficient power converters and synchronous reluctance generators are required to achieve high performance for hybrid renewable energy systems applications.