Excerpt
The third edition of
Power Electronics is intended as a textbook for a course on power electronics/static power converters for junior or senior undergraduate students in electrical and electronic engineering. It can also be used as a textbook for graduate students and as a reference book for practicing engineers involved in the design and applications of power electronics. The prerequisites are courses on basic electronics and basic electrical circuits. The content of
Power Electronics is beyond the scope of a one-semester course. The time allocated to a course on power electronics in a typical undergraduate curriculum is normally only one semester. Power electronics has already advanced to the point where it is difficult to cover the entire subject in a one-semester course. For an undergraduate course, Chapters 1 to 11 should be adequate to provide a good background on power electronics. Chapters 12 to 16 could be left for other courses or included in a graduate course. Table P 1 shows suggested topics for a one-semester course on "Power Electronics" and Table P2 for one semester course on "Power Electronics and Motor Drives."
The fundamentals of power electronics are well established and they do not change rapidly. However, the device characteristics are continuously being improved and new devices are added. Power Electronics, which employs the bottom-up approach, covers device characteristics conversion techniques first and then applications. It emphasizes the fundamental principles of power conversions. This third edition of Power Electronics is a complete revision of the second edition, and (i) features bottom-up approach rather than top-down approach; (ii) introduces the state-of-the-art advanced Modulation Techniques; (iii) presents three new chapters on "Multilevel Inverters" (Chapter 9), "Flexible AC Transmission Systems" (Chapter 13), and "Gate Drive Circuits" (Chapter 17) and covers state-of-the-art techniques; (iv) integrates the industry standard software, SPICE, and design examples that are verified by SPICE simulation; (v) examines converters with RL-loads under both continuous and discontinuous current conduction; and (vi) has expanded sections and/or paragraphs to add explanations. The book is divided into five parts:
- IntroductionChapter 1
- Devices and gate-drive circuitsChapters 2, 4, 7, and 17
- Power conversion techniquesChapters 3, 5, 6, 8, 9,10, and 11
- ApplicationsChapters 12,13,14,15, and 16
- Protection and thermal modelingChapter 18
Topics like three-phase circuits, magnetic circuits, switching functions of converters, DC transient analysis, and Fourier analysis are reviewed in the Appendices.
Power electronics deals with the applications of solid-state electronics for the control and conversion of electric power. Conversion techniques require the switching on and off of power semiconductor devices. Low-level electronics circuits, which normally consist of integrated circuits and discrete components, generate the required gating signals for the power devices. Integrated circuits and discrete components are being replaced by microprocessors and signal processing ICs.
An ideal power device should have no switching-on and -off limitations in terms of turn-on time, turn-off time, current, and voltage handling capabilities. Power semiconductor technology is rapidly developing fast switching power devices with increasing voltage and current limits. Power switching devices such as power BJTs, power MOSFETs, SITS, IGBTs, MCTs, SITHs, SCRs, TRIACs, GTOs, MTOs, ETOs, IGCTs, and other semiconductor devices are finding increasing applications in a wide range of products. With the availability of faster switching devices, the applications of modern microprocessors and digital signal processing in synthesizing the control strategy for gating power devices to meet the conversion specifications are widening the scope of power electronics. The power electronics revolution has gained momentum, since the early 1990s. Within the next 20 years, power electronics will shape and condition the electricity somewhere between its generation and all its users. The potential applications of power electronics are yet to be fully explored but we've made every effort to cover as many applications as possible in this book.