Semikron Danfoss Innovation & Young Engineer Awards Winners 2025
This year the jury has chosen to give the Semikron Danfoss Innovation Award to Axel Mertens from Institute for Drive Systems and Power Electronics, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany and his colleagues Niklas Himker, Georg Lindemann, Viktor Willich for their innovative work on ´Self-Sensing Control of Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machines: Enabling Widespread Use in Commercial Applications´.
In sensor-less control of electric drives, the rotor position sensor is eliminated by self-sensing control, which is correlated to several challenges, incl. the position estimation accuracy during both transient and steady-state conditions as well as the high computational demands.
The awarded team of researchers has addressed these challenges to make self-sensing control a viable choice for dynamic electric drive applications. By employing a slim numerical optimisation procedure instead of a conventional phase-locked loop, they have substantially enhanced the dynamic performance and accuracy and at the same time enabled analytical parametrisation of the system. Furthermore, computational demands could be drastically reduced by optimised sampled current measurements which eliminates the need for special digital hardware, enabling implementation on commercial controller hardware.
The innovation makes the self-sensing control applicable for saturable, buried-magnet Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machines (PMSM) even at low speeds down to zero. Furthermore, the development of a complete self-commissioning procedure eliminates the need for a rotor position sensor while identifying the parameters of the machine.
These innovations have the potential to extend self-sensing control to many applications of PMSM drives that require high control dynamics as well as fast automatic commissioning and seek increased power density and reliability.
Photo:
(F.l.t.r.) Uwe Schilling, Xufu Ren, Niklas Himker, Viktor Willich, Georg Lindemann, Axel Mertens, Leo Lorenz
This year's Semikron Danfoss Young Engineer Award is given to Xufu Ren from University of Cambridge, United Kingdom for his work on ´Highly Efficient and Compact 4: 1 Bus Converter for Next-generation AI Computing´.
The boom in artificial intelligence (AI) applications drives a spike in electrical energy use. The modern microprocessors for AI and cloud computing require more than one thousand amperes current at a less than one volt voltage. The rapid increase of power from CPUs and GPUs require unprecedented power density and efficiency for DC-DC converters, which is an emerging and challenging research topic for power electronics.
The 4: 1 intermediate bus architecture (IBA), comprising a first-stage fixed-ratio bus converter and multiple second-stage multi-phase voltage regulators, is increasingly used in 48V onboard power solutions. The awarded work presents a 4: 1 fixed-ratio bus converter achieving 1.5kW output power at 8.1kW/in3 power density. An improved switched auto-transformer topology is proposed with optimized high frequency transformer design. A small-signal model is developed to analyze the output impedance and facilitate parallel operation. An inclusive 1.5kW 4: 1 fixed-ratio converter with controller and auxiliary power supply is prototyped by industrial standards at a dimension as low as 23 x 17 x 7.7 mm3. The innovation has been verified by experiments including zero-voltage-switching (ZVS), start-up, transient performance, and paralleling operation. The prototype exhibits the peak efficiency of 98.0% and full-load efficiency of 97.0%, reaching the highest output power, power density, and efficiency among the existing commercial solutions.
About the Semikron Danfoss Innovation Award & Young Engineer Award
In 2012 the SEMIKRON Foundation began together with ECPE the annually award ceremony to motivate people of all ages and organisations of any legal status to pursue innovations in power electronics. Power electronics are a key technology of the 21st century, in order to improve environmental protection and sustainability by energy efficiency and conservation of resources.
Based on the years of excellent cooperation we decided to continue this great tradition and opportunity to encourage the research and development of new technologies – now renaming the award after the merger between SEMIKRON and Danfoss Silicon Power to Semikron Danfoss in 2022
Contact:
Jakob Stroem
Head of Communications
Phone: +49 170 105 3294