Electrifying the New Year

Author:
Jason Lomberg, North American Editor, PSD

Date
01/01/2024

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Jason Lomberg, North American Editor, PSD

Happy New Year!

Hopefully, you had a fantastic holiday, enjoyed some time with friends and family, and got this message close enough to January 1st where we haven’t passed the Happy New Year statute of limitations.

We have a lot to look forward to in 2024. First off is the grandaddy of all power electronics trade shows, APEC, set to kick off in a little more than a month in Long Beach, CA.

I’ll be there, strolling through the convention center with my fellow journalists, engineers, marketers, and techies, and I hope to connect with many of you in-person.

2024 is also an electronica year, and from November 12-15, around 70,000 visitors will make the pilgrimage to Munich, Germany for the biggest and most important event of the year.

A number of high-profile electric vehicles will hit the streets this year, including the 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV, Fisker Ocean, GMC Sierra EV, Honda Prologue, Tesla Model 3, and Volkswagen’s electrified hippie bus, the ID Buzz.

And perhaps the most (in)famous electric vehicle, Tesla’s Cybertruck, should be available starting this year. Get your pocketbooks (and snark) ready, because this futuristic eye sore will run you somewhere in the range of $60-100K.

We’ll also bear witness to the continued evolution of the IoT, AI, automation, renewable energy, solid-state lighting, and wide band-gap semiconductors. I expect I’ll hear about some (or all) of those topics next month at APEC.

Most importantly, all of us at Power Systems Design are privileged to continue bringing you the power electronics news, products, and design theory that you’ve come to expect from us.

And speaking of privileged, we’re thrilled to bring you a killer topic to kick off the new year, that being “EVs, Hybrids, and Charging Infrastructure.”

Last month’s “Automotive and Transportation” issue was skewed heavily towards electrification (because what’s hotter than EVs?), and we’re diving back into the fray this month with one of the most exciting subjects in the industry.

And I’d like to call out possibly the most unique article of the bunch, “Three-Phase LLC DC-DC Converters - the Unsung Heroes of the Transition to ‘More Electric Aircraft’”.

Henri Huillet, Chief Executive Officer at GAIA Converter, compares two LLC converter configurations: single-phase and three-phase, as they relate to More Electric Aircraft (MEA), ultimately concluding that three-phase is the ideal choice.

“A three-phase LLC converter promises to be more efficient and smaller overall,” Huillet says. “Because total area of silicon is less, the transformer is smaller and input and output ripple currents are greatly reduced, implying smaller capacitors and lower losses.”

Enjoy the January issue!

 

Best Regards,

 

Jason Lomberg

North American Editor, PSD

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