TEACHING

SOLUTIONS FOR EDUCATION

Thanks to their modular nature, imperix power modules are ideally suited for the teaching of power electronics. They indeed possess all the features – ranging from ease-of-use to robustness – to be safely put in the hands of students.

Besides, our digital controllers are easily programmable either with conventional C/C++ control development or using Simulink.

Imperix products offer a very flexible way to conduct laboratories or students projects at the graduate or undergraduate level.

Active learning instead of teaching

Enable students to discover things by themselves and confront their theoretical knowledge to the real world early. Iterations with simulation studies are always possible.

Demonstrating real-world challenges

Force students to face real-world issues such as start-up or shutdown procedures, protection or cooling. Power electronics always require to process some energy and not only data!

Reusing unified equipment

Reuse the same equipment for both teaching and research. Our products cover a broad range of applications and can be used with the most common power electronic simulation software.

Teach and demonstrate power converters

DEVELOP AND BUILD SHOWCASE SYSTEMS WITHIN MINUTES!

  • Use our building blocks as you would use LEGOS™ and create simple inverters or more complex converter topologies very easily.
  • Thanks to our ready-to-use power and control hardware, you no longer need to worry about practical issues. Demonstrating and teaching power converter control techniques can be your only focus.
  • Simulink/PLECS or C++ code gives you complete freedom and direct access to all control variables. Should you like to start with more than a blank page, imperix also provides a growing library of code examples to help you set started.

Plug-&-play power converter

A library-based approach for power electronics teaching

In educational applications, be it in classrooms or laboratories, imperix hardware is often used as off-the-shelf equipment, that can be mobilized upon variable needs.

Sometimes, a controller and few modules is all it takes, while sometimes extra sensors and multiple controllers are required.

SELECT THE EQUIPMENT

such as power modules, sensors and controller.

BuilD the electric circuit

using the available rack-moutable enclosured and DIN rails.

Connect the control side

by simply wiring the cables to the controller.

TEST the OPERATION

generating control from C++ code or an existing Simulink/PLECS scheme.

Discover power converter topologies

Nowadays, numerous power converter topologies have become basic as more advanced topologies emerged. Nevertheless, they remain widespread in industrial applications. As such, their design, control, and practical implementation remains part of virtually every power electronics teaching program.

Imperix power modules support the implementation of most elementary topologies, such a step-down converters (buck), step-up converters (boost), buck-boost, etc. They also support single-phase and three-phase inverters, medium-frequency converters (dual-active bridges or resonant converters), or even multilevel topologies.

From teaching the basics…
Buck converter (step-down converter)
Boost converter (step-up converter)
Buck/boost converter
… to demonstrating the essentials!
PFC converter (e.g. solar inverter)
Dual-active bridge
Three-phase inverter

A safe environment for education

Multi-layered protection scheme

As the protection of the users and laboratory equipment is of utmost importance in teaching applications, multiple types of protections can be implemented.

In any case, the B-Box RCP controller embeds a hardware protection that is always present and forces the user to acknowledge any issue before continuing operation.

Software protections

Abnormal conditions can easily be detected in software. The reliability of this approach is however limited to that of the software developed by the user.

Controller hardware protections

The B-Box RCP controller features programmable and software-independent protections. This offers a flexible and easy to use protection mechanism.

Power stage protections

All power modules possess on-board over-voltage, over-current and over-temperature thresholds, offering a last-resort protection, although not easily configurable.