Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Engineering Two-Dimensional Materials and Their Surroundings for Improved Electrical Performance" "Kristiaan De Greve" "Micro- and Nano Systems (MNS)" "2D materials, promising excellent electrostatic control, are being investigated to replace Si in highly scaled field-effect transistors (FETs). Performance of these 2D FETs is determined in large part by the transport properties of the 2D material. While predictions for free-standing 2D materials show high electron mobilities (>200cm2/Vs), the mobilities in practice turn out much lower (" "Horizon 2020: Highly EFFICIENT and reliable electric drivetrains based on modular, intelligent and highly integrated wide band gap power electronics modules" "Omar Hegazy" "Electronic Component Systems for European Leadership Joint Undertaking, Eindhoven University of Technology, Slovak University of Technology, RWTH Aachen University, Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, Interuniversitair Micro-Elektronica Centrum, Infineon Technologies AG, Infineon Technologies Austria AG, Fraunhofer Society, Mercedes-Benz (Germany), Technical University of Dortmund, AT&S Austria Technologie & Systemtechnik Aktiengesellschaft, AVL List GmbH, Polytechnic University of Turin, Chemnitz University of Technology, Silicon Austria Labs (Austria), University of Pisa, Faculty of Engineering, Electromobility research centre, Electrical Engineering and Power Electronics" "The European “Green Deal” initiative by the EU commission strives for sustainable mobility and efficient use of resources. Within HiEFFICIENT the project partners will work towards these goals and will develop the next generation of wide bandgap semiconductors (WBG) in the area of smart mobility. To boost this development and the market introduction in automotive applications, HiEFFICIENT partners have set ambitious goals to gain higher acceptance and achieve the maximum benefit in using WBG semiconductors: 1.) Reduction in Volume of 40%, by means of integration on all levels (component-, subsystem- and system level), 2.) Increase efficiency beyond 98%, while reducing losses of up to 50%, 3.) Increase reliability of wide band-gap power electronic system to ensure a lifetime improvement of up to 20%. To accomplish the targeted goals, the partners will work on industrial use cases to demonstrate the key achievements and the progress that goes beyond state of the art. This includes, amongst others, modular inverters with different voltage levels (such as 48V, 400V, 800V), flexible on- and multi-use off-board chargers for different voltage levels, multi-purpose DC/DC converters and test systems for power electronics’ lifetime testing. These use cases are led by OEMs and other industrial partners, who define requirements and specifications for the envisioned systems. The project work starts at component-level, developing highly integrated GaN and SiC devices, and is followed by multiobjective design optimization and virtual prototyping approaches. High integration means big challenges in thermal management, which will be addressed by the development of advanced cooling concepts and modularity for the sake of maintainability and flexibility for future applications. Finally, the demonstrators are integrated in relevant environments to proof the concepts and the applicability for electric drivetrains with higher integration, higher efficiency, and higher reliability." "High efficiency, high power density, cost effective, scalable and modular power electronics and control solutions for electric vehicles" "Michel De Paepe, Hendrik Vansompel" "Department of Electromechanical, Systems and Metal Engineering, Polytechnic University of Turin, BLUEWAYS INTERNATIONAL BVBA, Tenneco (Belgium), Türk Otomobil Fabrikası (Turkey), AVL DEUTSCHLAND GMBH, Ilmenau University of Technology, ELAPHE POGONSKE TEHNOLOGIJE DOO" "Focused on BEV architectures with distributed multiple wheel drives, and, specifically, in-wheel powertrains, HighScape will explore the feasibility of a family of highly efficient power electronics components and systems, and including integrated traction inverters, on-board chargers, DC/DC converters, and electric drives for auxiliaries and actuators. The proposed solutions will be assessed on test rigs and on two differently sized BEV prototypes. The project will result in: i) component integration with the incorporation of the WBG traction inverters within the in-wheel machines to achieve zero footprint of the electric powertrain on the sprung mass; the functional integration of the traction inverter with the on-board charger, and the incorporation of the latter and the DC/DC converters within the battery pack; and the implementation of multi-motor and fault-tolerant inverter solutions for the auxiliaries and chassis actuators; ii) novel solutions, including the implementation of reconfigurable winding topologies of the drive, as well as integrated and predictive thermal management at the vehicle level, with the adoption of phase changing materials within the power electronics components; iii) the achievement and demonstration of significantly higher levels of power density, specific power and energy efficiency for the resulting power electronics systems and related drives; iv) major cost reductions thanks to the dual use of parts, subsystem modularity, and model-based design to eliminate overengineering; and v) increased dependability and reliability of the power electronics systems, enabled by design and intelligent predictive health monitoring algorithms. Through HighScape, the participants will establish new knowledge and industrial leadership in key digital technologies, and, therefore, directly contribute to Europe’s Key Strategic Orientations as well as actively support the transformation towards zero tailpipe emission road mobility (2Zero)." "Horizon 2020: Highly EFFICIENT and reliable electric drivetrains based on modular, intelligent and highly integrated wide band gap power electronics modules (OZR EU BONUS)" "Omar Hegazy" "Electromobility research centre, Electrical Engineering and Power Electronics" "The European “Green Deal” initiative by the EU commission strives for sustainable mobility and efficient use of resources. Within HiEFFICIENT the project partners will work towards these goals and will develop the next generation of wide bandgap semiconductors (WBG) in the area of smart mobility. To boost this development and the market introduction in automotive applications, HiEFFICIENT partners have set ambitious goals to gain higher acceptance and achieve the maximum benefit in using WBG semiconductors: 1.) Reduction in Volume of 40%, by means of integration on all levels (component-, subsystem- and system level), 2.) Increase efficiency beyond 98%, while reducing losses of up to 50%, 3.) Increase reliability of wide band-gap power electronic system to ensure a lifetime improvement of up to 20%. To accomplish the targeted goals, the partners will work on industrial use cases to demonstrate the key achievements and the progress that goes beyond state of the art. This includes, amongst others, modular inverters with different voltage levels (such as 48V, 400V, 800V), flexible on- and multi-use off-board chargers for different voltage levels, multi-purpose DC/DC converters and test systems for power electronics’ lifetime testing. These use cases are led by OEMs and other industrial partners, who define requirements and specifications for the envisioned systems. The project work starts at component-level, developing highly integrated GaN and SiC devices, and is followed by multiobjective design optimization and virtual prototyping approaches. High integration means big challenges in thermal management, which will be addressed by the development of advanced cooling concepts and modularity for the sake of maintainability and flexibility for future applications. Finally, the demonstrators are integrated in relevant environments to proof the concepts and the applicability for electric drivetrains with higher integration, higher efficiency, and higher reliability.." "System-level hardware-based design techniques for EM Resilience: a necessity for safe and reliable programmable electronics" "Davy Pissoort" "Electrical Engineering Technology (ESAT), Bruges Campus, Waves: Core Research and Engineering (WaveCore), Distributed and Secure Software (DistriNet)" "With the advent of autonomous vehicles, Smart Cities, Industry 4.0 and many more Internet-of-Things related applications, our future society and lives become highly dependent on high-tech electronics. Unfortunately, all high-tech electronics are sensitive to ElectroMagnetic Interference (EMI), while the increasing electrification of, amongst others, vehicles and machines unavoidably means a much harsher electromagnetic environment. In addition, the continuing miniaturization of electronics and decreasing supply voltages makes new electronic products even more vulnerable to EMI. It is therefore of utmost importance to develop the required knowledge and techniques to assure that safety- or mission-critical systems will not suffer from unacceptable risks when being exposed to both intentional and unintentional EM disturbances. This challenge goes well beyond what is needed for compliance to the EMC Directive for CE certification for normal household applications. While for those applications, one malfunction in every 2-3 years might be perfectly acceptable, safety- or mission-related applications with possibly critical consequences might need a mean-time-between-failure of more than \SI{100}{} or even \SI{10000}{} years! For automotive applications, one even aims at only one dangerous failure in every 1 million years of operation due to the huge number of vehicles on the road.The aim of the study leading to this PhD manuscript was to create techniques and measures to help achieve resilience to EM disturbances in safety- or mission-critical systems. 'Resilience' as used here means that in case of disturbance, the developed techniques and measures should make the system 'real-time fault-tolerant' for EMI so that the system continues to work as intended in a safe manner. In practice, the study for this PhD manuscript focused on hardware-based techniques and measures to minimize the Bit-Error-Rate (BER) within crucial communication channels. This was done by modifying some commonly used techniques from the discipline of Functional Safety, such as redundancy in combination with majority voting, with the appropriate EMC knowledge to make them much more performant to cope with EMI.  Within Functional Safety, redundancy is mainly used to cope with random failures. However, EMI is a complex phenomenon which has to be seen as a systematic, common cause failure. Indeed, 'systematic' because a given system design in a given digital state will always behave in the same way when a given EM disturbance is applied. 'Common cause' because EMI influences many different components at the same time. A typical redundant system is to have two or more identical sets of hardware and software with the same inputs, and performing the same operations on them. When a malfunction occurs in one of these 'parallel channels', a comparator/voter detects that their outputs no longer agree and triggers appropriate actions to maintain safety. Unfortunately, the malfunctions that EMI creates in identical channels can easily be so similar that the comparator/voter cannot tell that there is a problem at all. In this PhD manuscript, several ways are presented to achieve that the parallel paths in a redundant system exhibit a different behaviour ('EM-diversity') when subjected to the same EMI. To validate the performance of the proposed EM-diversity techniques, an efficient simulation framework is used. This simulation framework allows to apply a large variation of EMI disturbances (incoming fields, transient disturbances, ESD, etc.) to (simplified) models of safety-critical systems. The post-processing integrates statistical analysis to check how electromagnetic disturbances affect e.g. the BER. Thanks to this, the effectiveness of different types of diverse redundancy (inversion, spatial, frequency, time, etc.) for various types of EMI can be compared in depth.The first part of this manuscript introduces two types of harsh Electromagnetic (EM) environments, namely a plane wave environment and reverberation environment. The first type can be compared with an open space environment in real life or an anechoic chamber as an EMC test environment. This type of environment subjects the system-under-test only to a single plane wave at a time. The second type of environment can be compared with a real life environment which has a lot of reflections occurring on e.g. as buildings, cars, humans, etc. In the EMC testing, this is mimicked in a reverberation chamber. This type of environment subjects the system-under-test to many plane waves, coming from many random directions, at the same time.The experiments that have to be performed to analyse the EM-diversity properties of the proposed techniques and measures are incorporated in an in-house built simulation framework. This simulation framework is optimised for efficiency and applicability. The effect of the two EM environments is modelled by a limited set of full-wave simulations of the geometry under consideration. The results from that simulation are implemented in the framework and the effect of the disturbances is calculated by using an efficiently implemented reciprocity-based technique. In addition, all properties of the encoding and decoding methods for the data which is communicated over the subjected geometry can be modified efficiently. By using sets of random data and varying the parameters within the model using a Monte-Carlo method, statistically relevant metrics are achieved and can be used to compare the effectiveness of the introduced techniques and measures (T\&Ms) to create EM-resilience. The metrics comprises the BER and the number of false negatives or undetectable errors.In this PhD manuscript, several new hardware EM-diverse T\&Ms are introduced. These T\&Ms are based on several properties of the hardware that can be changed. First, the possibility of matching or not matching the impedances of micro-strips is investigated on redundant and non-redundant geometries. Next, the use of an extra communication channel with inverted data is used to see if it could introduce EM-diverse behaviour. Furthermore, using three micro-strips in different orientations to create spatial diversity is investigated and effectively creates EM-diverse systems. Two final methods which change the timing of the data going over the communication channels is analysed. The transmission start time is changed to create time diversity and the transmission data rate is changed to create frequency diversity. Both methods show that they effectively introduce EM-diverse properties to the system, each with their own specific properties.In addition, this manuscript studies the use of a matched filter as a possible measure to create EM-resilience. The matched filter is a well-known digital processing technique in receivers to maximise the signal-to-noise ratio. This technique was never before investigated in the light of EM-resilience. Additionally, the matched filter method is compared with a majority voter. It is shown that using a matched filter could even be more effective than using a majority voter under some condition. The last part of this manuscript compares the proposed techniques in several ways and concludes which type of diversity to create EM resilience can be used in which situation. The comparison is based on the two main metrics used in this manuscript, namely the BER and the number of false-negatives or undetectable errors when using redundancy." "High performant Wide Band Gap Power Electronics for Reliable, energy eFficient drivetrains and Optimization thRough Multi-physics simulation." "Noshin Omar" "Electrical Engineering and Power Electronics, Electromobility research centre" "SUPPORT for EU-PROPOSAL H2020" "Active and passive components for resonant converters in wide voltage power electronics applications" "Wilmar Martinez Martinez" "Electrical Energy Systems and Applications (ELECTA)" "The use of passive components (transformers, idcutors, capacitors) can be employed to increase the number of degrees of freedom available for optimization procedures, extending the options to meet the demands of wide voltage range, high efficiency and high-level power. Additionally, due to the availability of high frequency magnetic materials and 3D printing techniques, the implementation of this approach might become easier and cost effective in the future. Therefore, research efforts on this topic must be conducted to exploit the technology potential. The working principle of controllable magnetics is based on the change of the magnetic flux at the core throughout a DC current, reaching in this way the nonlinear region, close to its saturation point, and as consequence a change in the self-inductance or magnetic inductance. This might be useful mainly at high power levels involving isolated converters, where having moderate increase in core losses due to the variation of controllable magnetic device could imply a big reduction in effective current at the circuit, and consequently in the resulting conduction losses. The aim of this project is to address the implications of downsizing transformers in power electronic converters for wide-voltage range-high frequency operation applications. It is stated that the accurate power loss modelling and simulation tools must be developed to determine for which extended range this technique is applicable, and research is challenging in many respects due to the nonlinear nature of the problem. The research will design a transformer for resonant converters with wide voltage gain range application, thereby gaining improvements in the performance of power electronics. Additionally, power converter modeling and power loss modeling for circuit design will be useful to the optimization. Finally, a compact transformer with wide voltage gain range, high-efficiency and high-power-density for high-frequency power electronics is expected." "Powering the Future of Electric Mobility: Next-Gen Bidirectional Electric Vehicle Chargers Using Innovative Power Electronics and Magnetic Design" "Wilmar Martinez Martinez" "Electrical Energy Systems and Applications (ELECTA)" "In the context of the ongoing energy transition and the electrification of mobility, flexible energystorage is pivotal to support the increasing share of renewable energy sources (RES) and theirintermitted, weather dependant energy production. Electric vehicles (EV) can a provide substantialbattery capacity using smart vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging. Hereby, the EV can be charged duringthe night at low demand or during the day with predominantly RES energy. Then at peak demand, itcan supply some of its energy back to the grid. However, V2G adoption requires disruptive technicalimprovements to the on-board charger (OBC) of EVs. Effective use of V2G relies on ultra-efficientpower transfer and ultra-compact chargers due to the strict automotive packaging limitations. Thisresearch will design, model, build, and analyse the next generation of V2G capable OBCs.Breakthrough efficiency and power density will be achieved using innovative power electronicconcepts such as novel wide bandgap switches, custom planar magnetics, controllable magneticcomponents, and innovative topologies. The expected result is a state-of-the-art 11kW V2G capableOBC with 6kW/l power density and a 98.5% efficiency over the whole charging cycle. Furthermore,the accurate and validated OBC models will be used to develop detailed charging guidelines. Thesemodels and guidelines will then support the implementation of V2G in the design of future charginginfrastructure in microgrids and smart grids." "Optimal cooling of power electronics and other high-power density electric components" "Johan Driesen" "Electrical Energy Systems and Applications (ELECTA)" "In production machines, more and more electric motors are being used each driven by their own power electronics. Moreover, the power densities of these components are ever increasing. This results in a growing number of distrubuted heat sources in the machine with higher levels of emitted heat. To guarantee proper operation and long lifetime of these components, they have to be adequately cooled.The main goal of the opcope_icon project is to develop a methodology, supported by simple models, that will allow mechatronics engineers to design compact, energy-efficient cooling systems for industrial machinery that comprises distributed, high energy actuators and power electronic components." "Integrating AI Techniques into Control Strategies for Enhanced Performance and Adaptability in Power Electronics" "Wilmar Martinez Martinez" "Electrical Energy Systems and Applications (ELECTA)" "Power electronic converters play a crucial role in modern electrical systems by efficiently managing power flow, voltage levels, and frequency regulation. However, the conventional control methods employed in these converters often face challenges related to adaptability, performance optimization, and fault detection. This research aims to address these challenges by integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques into control strategies for power electronics.The proposed study focuses on leveraging AI algorithms such as machine learning and neural networks to develop intelligent control systems capable of enhancing the performance and adaptability of power electronic converters. By harnessing the learning capabilities of AI, the control strategies can adapt to dynamic operating conditions, optimize performance in transient states, and mitigate the effects of modeling uncertainties."