0000000000117068
AUTHOR
Rupert Gouws
Overview of Power Electronic Switches: A Summary of the Past, State-of-the-Art and Illumination of the Future.
As the need for green and effective utilization of energy continues to grow, the advancements in the energy and power electronics industry are constantly driven by this need, as both industries are intertwined for obvious reasons. The developments in the power electronics industry has over the years hinged on the progress of the semiconductor device industry. The semiconductor device industry could be said to be on the edge of a turn into a new era, a paradigm shift from the conventional silicon devices to the wide band gap semiconductor technologies. While a lot of work is being done in research and manufacturing sectors, it is important to look back at the past, evaluate the current progr…
Smart Cooling System for Milk Transportation in Rural Areas
In the dairy industry, road milk tankers transport milk from one location to another. The milk inside the tanker needs to be kept between 3–5 °C to ensure that the quality of milk is always preserved. The tanker needs to be kept running at all time with the case of sufficient energy being continuously supplied to the cooling unit. The source of energy normally used for this application is a typical generator which needs fuel to operate. This is expensive and is not environmentally friendly. To address this problem, generator as a source of energy needs to be replaced by solar energy to lower the costs associated with cooling of the tanker. In this research a small scale solar powered intell…
A comprehensive review of energy sources for unmanned aerial vehicles, their shortfalls and opportunities for improvements
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles were first introduced almost 40 years ago and their applications have increased and diversified substantially since then, in both commercial and private use. One of the UAVs main issues when it comes to mobility is that the power sources available are inadequate, this highlights an area for improvement as the interest in drones is on the increase. There exist many different types of power supplies applied to UAVs, however each has their own limitations and strengths that pertain to weight contributions, charging and discharging times, size, payload capabilities, energy density and power density. The aim of this paper is to review the main power sources available for…
Hybrid Energy Storage for Underground Mining EV
One of the main concerns when it comes to contributions to the carbon footprint is the consumption of fuel by vehicles, more specifically that of mining vehicles. One solution to this problem is replacing the combustion engine vehicles with electric vehicles. This also poses the problem of low power density. This paper proposes a solution of using supercapacitors and hybrid capacitors with the aim of investigating how they can affect the performance of electric vehicles. For this purpose, a background of fuel consumption and alternative solutions to the problem are discussed, a prototype was designed and built. It was found that when supercapacitors and hybrid capacitors were used in combin…