Tiny Power Box

The project aims to develop a highly compact, bidirectional 7 and 11 kW inverter as an onboard charger for e-mobility applications.

Project Objectives

• Design of two demonstrator variants for an onboard charger:
  • one optimized for power density with water cooling at 7 kW for automotive applications,
  • one optimized for efficiency with passive/air cooling at 11kW with 3-phase input voltage for electric forklift applications.
• Exploit benefits of system optimization via simulation for power density and efficiency for power electronic applications, and show the benefits of PCB embedding by comparing demonstrators to an embedded spin-off
• Use the design of these converters as a “vehicle” for developing a system-level, holistic design-by-simulation workflow

The main challenges and topics of investigation are:

• Development of a combination of circuit and control design that sets a new benchmark in power density - while meeting industrial standards
• Establishment of a demonstrator using the latest components and integration technologies, based on the expertise of the industrial project partners representing the entire value chain of power electronics
• The new simulation-based development methodology is intended to fill remaining gaps by embedding critical physical effects such as temperature, EMC or lifetime effects into the simulation process
• Development of an efficient data exchange between the individual software packages of the co-simulation workflow and use of the same also in future projects and with industrial partners