Ally Winning, European Editor, PSD
Welcome to the July edition of Power Systems Design Europe. Summer is generally the quietest time for the industry before the busy autumn season. It gives us the chance to relax and recharge ourselves and also some time to reflect on the beginning of the year. Within a comparatively short period of time, things are starting to look a bit less positive in the industry. Tariffs have had a chilling effect on the worldwide economy, and electrical engineering has been a global industry for decades now, with dozens of countries involved in the process of making a single component, from raw material extraction to finished production. Countries were already trying to make their own supply chains more robust after the Covid pandemic, and tariffs will add a financial incentive to accelerate that process.
One thing that could be the key to boosting the economy and encouraging consumer spending is an improvement in energy storage technology. Today we predominantly use batteries for that purpose, and it is difficult to overstate how important they have become to our lives. Currently, scientists around the world are working diligently to make batteries smaller, safer, cheaper, higher capacity, faster charging, lower cost, or any combination of these factors. Adding 30km, or even 100km to a vehicle’s range might not attract many new buyers, but cutting the cost of the battery pack significantly could make a very large difference to EV adoption. Similarly, finding an economic, long term, large scale storage solution could revolutionize the energy industry. Better batteries can provide a real enhancement any product that they are installed in.
In this month’s Special Report, we will look at batteries and other storage devices. The first article in the Special Report is one of the ‘other’ storage technologies. The article, contributed by RECOM, tells us how kilowatt DC/DC converters enable fuel cells that offer practical solutions for sectors that are hard to electrify, limit our reliance on scarce minerals like lithium, and can help take some stress off the electrical grid.
While scientists work to improve battery technology, we have to make the best of the products that we currently have available. The second article in the Special Report comes from Dukosi, a company that has developed a unique battery monitoring technology. Knowing accurate values for the voltage and temperature allows state of charge (SoC) and state of health (SoH) to be calculated for batteries, and those figures allow manufacturers to extract the maximum useable energy.
The final article in this month’s Special Report comes from Texas Instruments and it covers how to achieve functional safety compliance to ISO 26262 in automotive off-battery buck preregulator designs.
As well as the articles in the Special Report, this month’s magazine will also include general articles of interest to power electronics engineers in our Tech Focus section, as well as the latest news and views from the industry.
Best Regards,
Ally Winning
European Editor, PSD
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