High Performance Power Electronics Integrations

The EU-funded HiPE project is developing energy-efficient, cost-effective, modular, compact and integrated wide band gap (WBG) power electronics for next-generation battery electric vehicles. The aim is to facilitate a more significant market penetration of WBG in the automotive sector.

HiPE brings together 13 participants covering the whole value chain, to develop a new highly energy-efficient, cost-effective, modular, compact and integrated wide bandgap (WBG) power electronics solutions for the next generation of battery electric vehicles (BEV), and to facilitate a significant market penetration of WBG in the automotive sector.

The project outputs will include:

1. a scalable and modular family of WBG-based traction inverters and DC/DC converters with significantly improved specific cooling performance, suitable for 400V, 800V and 1200V applications, with power ratings from 50 to 250 kW, integrated into electric drives enabling drastic size and weight reductions;
2. a family of integrated WBG-based on-board chargers and DC/DC converters, with optimised innovative topologies, including use of GaN;
3. integrated, fault-tolerant and cost-effective GaN-based power electronics for high-voltage ancillaries and chassis actuators.

The result will be an unprecedented level of functional integration, e.g. the HiPE power electronics solutions will be smart cyber-physical systems, incl. intelligent and predictive controllers to optimise performance, innovative and computationally efficient data-driven approaches to monitor the state-of-health of the relevant hardware, as well as novel digital-twin-based methodologies to tailor the component- and vehicle-level algorithms to the specific condition of the hardware installed on each individual BEV, and actively control the reliability and availability of the relevant parts. This will be achieved while preserving the expected automotive quality level without having to recur to overengineering, thanks to the innovative implementation of data-driven dependability techniques for cyber-physical systems. The extensive simulation analyses running in parallel with the design and experimental activities will further demonstrate the scalability, modularity and wider potential impact of power electronics solutions.