Prof. Liuchen Chang, Presidente, IEEE-PELS

Prof. Mario Pacas, VP - Global Relations, IEEE-PELS

Dr. Amaury Pozos, Secretario de Investigación y Posgrado, UASLP

Dr. Emilio González, Director de la Facultad de Ingeniería, UASLP

Today, products are changing very rapidly, customers have more choices, tremendous price pressure exists on suppliers, and there is pressure to test quickly. However, the traditional test and qualification standards have been inadequate in preventing failures. In fact, over the past 20 years, there have been an increasingly large number of electronics that have passed qualification tests but have failed in the field. The resulting costs of these failures have been in the hundreds of millions of dollars for many companies.

This talk will overview why the current qualification methods are inadequate, why the standards need to be replaced and how companies can qualify products in an accelerated manner to ensure acceptable reliability. One new approach pertains to in-situ product reliability assessment incorporating a fusion of data recognition and physics-of-failure based prognostics. Prognostics is a process of assessing the extent of deviation or degradation of a product from its expected normal operating conditions over time, to predict the future reliability of the product.

This lecture provides an introduction to model predictive control in power electronics. In academia, finite control set model predictive control (FCS-MPC) is mostly considered, typically with a horizon of one. In industry, MPC based on optimized pulse patterns and indirect MPC are used for high-power variable speed drives; both industrial MPC methods improve the efficiency, increase the rated power and lower the overall cost of the drive system. The lecture concludes with a critical assessment of the state-of-the-art in predictive control, and points out challenges and directions for future research.

During this presentation, we will discuss an overview of the impact of electrification in the agriculture industry and how Power Electronics has become a key module in the company. Some of the current challenges & areas of opportunity relative to the different electrification enablers (Energy Storage Systems, Converters, Controls & Electric Machines) will be explained to the audience. 

Power systems are experiencing a rapid and dramatic transformation driven by the massive integration of non-dispatchable renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, and highly variable loads, such as electric vehicles and air conditioning. This challenges existing grid assets, eventually leading to updating them, which, in turn, significantly increases the costs of sustainable technologies. Power electronics is a pivotal technology for electrical power processing for renewable energies and sustainable transportation. By means of ``smart'' functionalities, power electronics converters already embedded in such applications can also contribute to guaranteeing the overall system's stable operation. Anyway, this cooperative contribution from distributed devices may not be enough leading to the need for the voltage transformation and power transmission of ``system-level'' power electronics solutions. In the case of large charging stations, a smart transformer (ST), while, in the case of large solar and wind parks, integration medium- or high-voltage direct current (HVdc) transmissions are system-level solutions. This talk wants to review the potential of using such infrastructures to increase the capacity of existing grid assets, avoiding or deferring their upgrade and, hence, reducing the overall costs of renewables integration and the electrification of the transport sector. In fact, the power converters embedded in ST and HVdc can provide fast frequency and voltage response and precise control of power flow acting at the system level much more effectively and feasibly for system operators as the distributed power converters embedded in several small sources and users. This work reviews, for the first time, these two key power electronics ``system-level'' solutions together--ST and HVdc--starting from their basic functionalities and showings how they can go beyond them, showing how, with grid-forming functionalities, they can offer new ``smart grid'' tools to enhance the capability of the existing electric grid infrastructures.

El aprovechamiento de la energía es uno de los principales motores de una sociedad. El desarrollo de los países está estrechamente ligado al crecimiento de los sistemas eléctricos y a su capacidad de generar la energía que se consume. Es por ello que el contar con un sistema eléctrico eficiente y moderno es estratégico para cualquier país. La evolución de los sistemas eléctricos a su vez es influenciada por diversas tecnologías disruptivas, tales como los sistemas de conversión de energía, las tecnologías de Informática y comunicación, los procesos de almacenamiento de energía y la electrónica de potencia. La adopción de estas tecnologías depende mucho de la estrategia energética de cada país, las cuales según el Consejo Mundial de la Energía (WEC) pueden agruparse en el llamado Trilema Energético: asegurar el suministro energético competitivo, proporcionar el acceso universal a la energía y; la protección ambiental. En una visión más amplia, se propone agrupar en cinco dimensiones los intereses o estrategias que promueven la evolución de los sistemas eléctricos: dimensión técnica, dimensión económica, dimensión social, dimensión sustentable y dimensión política. Se presentan algunos ejemplos de cómo bajo estas cinco dimensiones se puede analizar el efecto de las innovaciones tecnológicas como la electrónica de potencia en los sistemas eléctricos.

Nowadays, the solid-lighting concept arises with the compromise of being friendly technology with long life and high efficiency. The inherent luminous efficacy and high reliability make LEDs lighting applications a trend in the area. They require constant power to ensure a long lifetime, so the design of power supplies must consider the input and output power quality. In the case of supplying the power supply from AC voltage, regulations of power factor, THD, EMI, galvanic isolation, and so on must be met. Therefore, many topologies have been presented in the literature and have been applied as a final product for LED drivers. This talk will be about the current topologies, future trends, and future research challenges in LED drivers from the industrial point of view. To finalize, an assessment of the research development in LED drivers to the industrial level will be done.