Advances in power electronics and drives-their impact on energy and environment

Summary form only given. Energy has been the life-blood for continuing progress of human civilization. Since the beginning of industrial revolution around two centuries ago, the global energy consumption has increased by leaps and bounds to accelerate the human living standard on this planet, particularly in the industrialized nations. Per-capita energy consumption, particularly in electrical form, has been a barometer of a nation´s economic prosperity. Today, the major amount of electricity is generated by fossil fuel and nuclear power plants. Fossil Juel plants create environmental pollution problem whereas the nuclear plants have safety problem. These pollution and safety problems are now causing major concerns in our society. How can we continuously improve our living standard, and at the same time, live in a cleaner and safer environment? Renewable energy sources, and possibly the fusion energy in future (if at all possible), can to a certain extent mitigate these problems, but conservation of energy with more efficient use of electricity is a definite method of solving this problem. Power electronics and drives technology is recently showing a major impact in energy conservation besides its general role in global industrial automation. The presentation will begin by broad introduction of global energy generation, depletion of fossil and nuclear fuels, environmental pollution, and energy conservation scenarios. The role of power electronics and drives technology, which has gone through rapid advancement during the last four decades will be reviewed in a broader perspective. The recent advances of power semiconductor devices, converter topologies, variable frequency drives, control and estimation techniques will be discussed, and technology trends will be outlined wherever possible. More recently, the emerging AI technology tools, such as expert system, fuzzy logic, neural network and genetic algorithm are expanding the frontier of power electronic and drives.