The Second IASTED Africa
Conference
on
Power and Energy Systems
~AfricaPES 2008~
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
September 8 – 10, 2008
Gaborone, Botswana
TUTORIAL SESSION
Power Electronics and Motor Drives -Advances, Applications and Trends
Abstract
The technology of power electronics and motor drives has recently emerged as a large, complex and multi-disciplinary field in electrical engineering that is extremely important for modern power engineers. The applications of this area are now fast expanding in industrial, commercial, residential, transportation, utility, aerospace, and military systems primarily due to reduction of cost, size, and improvement of performance. In the global industrial automation and energy conservation trends of the 21st century, the widespread impact of power electronics is inevitable. It appears that the role of power electronics on our society in future will tend to be as important and versatile as that of information technology today. Many inventions in power semiconductor devices, converters, PWM techniques, analytical and simulation methods, electrical machines, motor drives, control and simulation methods, digital signal processors and ASICs, and personal computers during the last three decades have contributed to this advancement. Very recently, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques has created an advancing frontier of power electronics that is offering challenge to traditional power and power electronic engineers.
The advanced state-of-the-art tutorial will give a broad and comprehensive overview of recent advances and applications of power electronics and motor drives technology. The advances of devices, converters, machines, drives and advanced control techniques will be reviewed briefly. A number of recent applications of converters and motor drives that are particularly relevant to power engineers will be illustrated. There will be particular emphasis on AI-based (fuzzy logic and neural network) control and estimation with application examples. The advances and trends of the technology will be highlighted, wherever possible. Finally, a conclusion will be drawn for the presentation.
