I-Corps: Highly Scalable Differential Power Processing Architecture

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of more efficient schemes for power processing and delivery for potential markets such as photovoltaics and data centers. Typical solar installations can fall far short of harvesting even the incident power when only part of a panel is shaded. The project would utilize an architecture that has not been successfully commercialized in this industry. Successful implementation would mean better utilized solar installations with smaller and cheaper power electronics, helping decarbonize the US electrical grid. For data centers, power must be stepped down from a high voltage DC bus to many low voltage CPU loads, leading to significant losses. In this case, the proposed power processing scheme could result in much lower losses, thus enabling greater efficiency and cost savings in this increasingly energy-hungry application space. This I-Corps project is based on the development of a scalable control scheme for a differential power processing architecture that reduces costs and could spur adoption. The proposed architecture utilizes many (smaller, lighter-rated, and potentially cheaper) power converters to better optimize power utilization using differential power processing (DPP). Traditional approaches might use one large power converter to process power that would end up not harvesting/delivering the maximum utilizable power. The key advantage of DPP architectures is that individual power converters only process the difference in power between their respective sources or loads and that most of the power does not need to be processed by any converter at all, leading to efficiency gains. The novelty of this project’s implementation is that control of individual converters can be decentralized, leading to higher reliability and lower costs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.