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Thank you to sponsor National Instruments!

This product will miniaturize three-phase inverters and increase efficiency, operability, and application versatility using FPGAs. A recent challenge set out by Google and IEEE called The Little Box Challenge points out that “inverters are too big” and “Making them smaller would enable more solar-powered homes, more efficient distributed electrical grids, and could help bring electricity to the most remote parts of the world.” Our system sets out to make a smaller inverter system that could be used in many renewable applications. The product’s main application is for electric vehicles.

The controller that helps solve this problem is the myRIO from National Instruments. This device has reconfigurable inputs and outputs and contains an FPGA along with a microcontroller. The product will use the FPGA in the myRIO to implement a switched mode power supply three-phase inverter as well as a boost converter. The FPGA will increase configurability, increase speed, decrease price, and lower power consumption. A custom PCB will be designed to house the hardware. NI’s Labview will be used for hardware and software simulations. With these simulation tools, we can better design our three-phase inverter and boost converter to be as efficient and reliable as possible.

National Instruments will benefit from the creation of the three-phase inverter system because it will showcase myRIO capabilities, as well as how myRIO can help advance some of the research and development of renewable systems. The three-phase inverter system is also applicable to many more applications such as other motor/generators systems, solar and wind energy, power generation/transmission, reactive power compensation, microgrids, and battery storage. Application users will benefit by getting real-time feedback of their system.

The greatest capability of the device being created is reconfigurability. By implementing the inverter with FPGA control, the product provides a much more favorable architecture for power electronics. Most commonly SMPS systems are not implemented with an FPGA. Doing so will provide the system with superior performance in terms of speed, price, and power consumption, as well as real-time feedback on the system through an iOS application.