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Staff, Expertise & Research Areas
The team of scientific co-workers,
senior engineers and technicians of about
20 persons is headed by Prof. Joachim
Böcker. Before his appointment in 2003,
Prof. Böcker gained 13 years of experi-
ence in industrial research and develop-
ment with AEG and Daimler. The depart-
ment is focusing on three main areas:
power electronics, electrical drives and
energy management. The nature of the
projects varies from basic research to
applied research in cooperation with
various industrial partners.
Power Electronics
Challenges to be solved are application-
specific energy conversion, control and
distribution - always aiming to improve
the system performance with respect to
efficiency, volume, weight and dynamics.
Currently considered applications are
power supplies for data centres, electric
spot welding, chargers for EVs/HEVs,
DC/DC converters in power distribution
systems, piezo electric drives and piezo
electric assisted cutting and bonding
applications.
Main Topics
•
Soft and hard switching techniques for
isolating and non-isolating topologies
•
Power semiconductors (Si, SiC, GaN)
switching loss characterisation
•
Control concepts for PFC rectifiers and
resonant converters
Electrical Drives
Application areas cover traction drives
for EVs/HEVs, servo drives for industrial
applications, wind power generators and
high speed drives for turbo compressors
and machine tools.
Principal objectives are improvement of
the drive system performance and opti-
mized utilisation of energy and resources.
Recently also the improvement of system
reliability and safety level are targeted.
Main Topics
•
Various controller (e.g. FOC, DTC, MPC)
and observer concepts
•
Modelling and simulation, HiL, dynamic
co-simulation (FEA & time-domain)
•
Thermal modelling and system identi-
fication
•
Model-based fault detection and
management (e.g. fault-tolerant control)
Energy Management
Aspects for reduction of supply costs, the
increase of total system efficiency and in
general the most economic use of energy
are investigated.
Typical applications within the focus are:
industrial microgrids, loads in the domestic
area, EVs/HEVs and hybrid energy storage
systems.
Main Topics
•
Model predictive control
•
Analysis and prediction of power profiles
•
Optimal component/system dimensioning
Laboratory
Well equipped with high-performance
measuring equipment to solve different
measurement challenges.
Electric Motor Test Beds
•
Air-conditioned motor test cabin with
load machines up to 250 kW
•
RCP hardware (DSP/FPGA-based)
•
Rotor telemetry system
Power Electronic Test Beds
•
Programmable power supplies/sinks
•
Power semiconductor characterisation
test beds
•
Calorimetric power loss measurement
Paderborn University
Power Electronics and Electrical Drives
Converter for electric spot welding
Energy management
Thermal modelling of electrical drives
