Power Testbench and Upcoming Power Electronics Tutorials

While I have written many articles on this blog about power electronics related topics, I am hoping to share more fundamentally structured tutorials and articles, based on power electronics fundamentals that have been reinforced during my time in graduate school. To that end, I have designed a testbench to cover topics ranging from basics to slightly more involved ones. I have completed the design of a power electronics test bench, sent out the PCB files to be fabbed at OSHPark, and ordered parts from Digikey.

Here are some ideas I have for topics to cover, and I'd love to get feedback on other topics of interest!

• Basic demonstration of buck and boost conversion
• Estimation of capacitor ripple
• Bidirectional blocking circuit
• Isolated vs bootstrapped gate drive
• Sizing inductor and operating with large ripple current
• Boundary conduction mode operation
• Efficiency characterization
• Impact of deadtime on efficiency
• PV panel behavior emulation with lab power supply
• MPPT operation with PV panel

Here are a couple 3D renders of the testbench hardware from Altium:

Top side render

Bottom side render

I will go over more details of the design and will be sharing the Altium design files and bringup progress when the board is back! I am hoping to use this design and framework to provide more structured tutorials on power electronics, building on past articles on this blog.