Reliable Power Systems and Integrated Circuits

Completed

Other Power and Storage Technologies(Electricity transmission and distribution)

Basic and strategic applied research

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting

Dr P Wilson
Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton

Standard

EPSRC

01 April 2008

31 December 2008

9 months

£6,040

Info. & commun. Technol.

South East

Information & Communication Technology

Dr P Wilson, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton

This research is intended to research ways in which existing energy can be reliably controlled and directed to domestic power users. The source of the energy could be mains, or variable sources such as renewable energy.The way the research can make an impact is by using smart power switches with on board processors (like in a PC) to manage the power flow in an intelligent way.One of the key issues is making this type of system reliable in the field - it has to work all the time - and so one specific aspect will be to improve the reliability of the basic power switches and to deal with outages properly.Normally in this type of system, the complex electronics tends to be taken seperately from the high power side, but one novel aspect of this proposed work is the ability to use high performance on board instrumentation of the power electronics using "low" power processing.The teams in the collaboration have complementary expertise in Power Electronics, IC Design and Devices which make this a unique opportunity in many respects to take some important steps forward

28/04/08