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Project

Mains facing AC/DC power converter with efficient standby mode

Electronic devices spend most of their lifetime doing nothing, in the so-called standby mode. Summing all power of a device consumed in standby during its entire live, gives a total amount of standby energy that is much larger than the energy consumed during activity.
All these electronic devices are powered by the mains through a power management circuit which is designed to be efficient in active mode. It is however very inefficient in the standby mode, leading to a large energy waste. In active mode the converters achieve an efficiency around 80%, while this value can drop with almost 20% in standby.
The intended doctoral research wants to face this standby mode and make it more efficient by using a two converter model. One power converter is used to deliver the high powers during activity and the other can be optimised for the standby mode, thus making it possible to have more efficient consumer electronic devices.

The research wants to come up with a design that is fully integrated in the current power devices. This gives some difficulties. First of all the power converter needs to interface the high voltage of the AC-mains. Secondly, the research wants to increase the output power so that a wide variety of appliances with different standby power can profit from the proposed solution. The research should lead to less consuming power converters and as a result to ‘greener’ consumer electronic devices.

Date:1 Oct 2016 →  9 Dec 2021
Keywords:Integrated Power Conversion, Efficiency
Disciplines:Nanotechnology, Design theories and methods
Project type:PhD project