Power electronics are the lifeblood of many exciting emerging technologies in transportation, energy systems, manufacturing, healthcare, information technology, and more. These applications demand power electronics with ever-increasing efficiency and performance with ever-decreasing size and cost. While major advances along these dimensions have been enabled by wide-bandgap semiconductor devices and digital control, further advancement is now majorly bottlenecked by passive components, particularly magnetics (i.e., inductors and transformers). Magnetics have long been integral to power electronics, but they pose fundamental size and performance challenges at small scales that impede miniaturization. 

This talk explores how we can leverage an alternative passive component technology - piezoelectric components – to unlock a new era of scalability for power electronics. Piezoelectrics offer numerous potential size, performance, and manufacturability advantages, including energy densities orders of magnitude greater than those of magnetics, but realizing these advantages will require fundamental re-evaluation of both power electronic circuits and piezoelectric components themselves. Accordingly, this talk will present the following recent advances: (1) Piezoelectric-based circuit topologies and control for dc-dc converters and “active inductors”; (2) Piezoelectric component design concepts including “overtone” piezoelectric resonators and isolated piezoelectric transformers. These strategies enable high-performance use of piezoelectrics as power passive components and expand their utility to wider variety of power conversion applications. 

Jessica Boles is the Chenming Hu Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and inaugural Co-Director of the Berkeley Power and Energy Center. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in electrical engineering. Her research interests span power electronic circuit topologies, control, and applications, as well as passive component design and fabrication. Boles has received the ARPA-E IGNIITE Award, the NASA Early Career Faculty Award, and the NSF CAREER Award. Her work has been recognized with three IEEE prize paper awards and the IEEE PELS Ph.D. Thesis Talk Award. She is a past recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the MIT Collamore-Rogers Fellowship, the MIT EECS Department Head Special Recognition Award, and the UT Knoxville Bodenheimer Fellowship.

Also available via Zoom:  Meeting ID: 827 9790 9904 Passcode: MRC-DSS