Piezoelectric-Based Power Electronics: Converters, Components, and Miniaturization
Join us for a webinar featuring Prof. Jessica Boles from UC Berkeley on “Piezoelectric-Based Power Electronics: Converters, Components, and Miniaturization.” This talk will explore how piezoelectric components can replace traditional magnetics to unlock new levels of efficiency, scalability, and miniaturization in power electronics.
Date: Thursday, April 17, 2025
Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Location:
- In-Person: Van Leer Building, Room 225 (Lunch provided with RSVP)
- Online: Join via MS Teams (link/QR code)
Abstract:
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 eliminate magnetics and unlock a new era of scalability for power electronics. Piezoelectrics offer numerous potential size, performance, and manufacturability advantages, including energy densities three orders of magnitude greater than magnetics, but harnessing these advantages requires 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”. These strategies enable the efficient utilization of piezoelectric components as primary passive components for power conversion. (2) Piezoelectric component design concepts including “overtone” piezoelectric resonators and isolated piezoelectric transformers. These components enable high-efficiency piezoelectric-based power conversion for applications requiring low load impedance and galvanic isolation, respectively.
These are important steps in realizing the performance and miniaturization potential of piezoelectrics for power electronics in a wide variety of applications.
Date and Time
Location
Hosts
Registration
- Date: 17 Apr 2025
- Time: 05:00 PM UTC to 06:00 PM UTC
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- 777 Atlantic Dr NW
- Atlanta, Georgia
- United States 30332
- Building: Van Leer Building
- Room Number: 225
- Click here for Map
- Starts 13 April 2025 04:00 AM UTC
- Ends 17 April 2025 04:00 AM UTC
- 3 in-person spaces left!
- No Admission Charge
Speakers
Prof. Jessica Boles
Piezoelectric-Based Power Electronics: Converters, Components, and Miniaturization
Biography:
Jessica Boles is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and Co-Director of the recently launched 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 area is power electronics, and her interests span power electronic components, circuits, control, and applications. She is currently pursuing a new class of power electronics based on piezoelectric passive components to enable major advances in the performance, size, and cost of power conversion for a wide variety of electronic and energy systems.
Boles has received the ARPA-E IGNIITE Award, the NASA Early Career Faculty Award, and the UC Berkeley Presidential Chair Fellowship. Her work has been recognized with two IEEE prize paper awards, the IEEE PELS Ph.D. Thesis Talk Award, and multiple prize presentation awards. She is a past recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the MIT Collamore-Rogers Fellowship, and the UT Knoxville
Bodenheimer Fellowship. She is also a past recipient of the MIT EECS Department Head Special Recognition Award and the UT Knoxville Chancellor's Citation for Professional Promise.
Media
| Talk_04172025_GaTech_Prof_Boles_2 | 330.73 KiB | |
| Talk_04172025_GaTech_Prof_Boles_5 | 1.21 MiB |