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Belgian team wins $1m Little Box Challenge

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Wide bandgap semiconductors the key to winning designs


Belgium's Red Electrical Devils, a team from CE+T Power, has won the Little Box Challenge, a competition set up by Google and IEEE to invent a much smaller inverter for interconnecting solar power systems to the power grid.

The CE+T Power inverter, which was based on GaN transistors, had a power density of 143 W/in3 (far greater than the minimum requirement of 50 W/in3 and 50 percent higher than the nearest competitor) and a volume of 14 cubic inches. 

The inverter also performed better on measurements of electromagnetic compliance.

The success earned the team a $1 million prize while proving that inverters can be the size of a tablet or smaller rather than the size of a picnic cooler, more than a factor of 10 reduction in size. 

Teams from Schneider Electric and the Virginia Tech Future Energy Electronics Center won honourable mentions. The winners were announced at the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in Washington, DC, which aims to move transformational energy technologies out of the lab and into the market.

 A key factor in the winning inverters was the use of wide bandgap semiconductors such as GaN and SiC, according to Blake Lundstrom, the NREL project lead. "Wide bandgaps offer a lot of advantages over traditional silicon that enabled teams to hit some of the miniaturisation and efficiency targets that were needed to be successful in the competition," he said. "Not every single team used wide-bandgap devices, but the vast majority did."

The US Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) provided critical analysis of the 18 finalists teams' inverters to help determine the winner. The first step was to verify that the inverters met all critical safety-related specifications and then to simply turn the inverters on and see if they functioned. 

Next, was a three-hour procedure to operate the inverters at a number of different operating points and to verify that key specifications were met. After these challenges, the field of eighteen finalists was narrowed to the remaining inverters that would proceed to the third round.

The final inverters were subjected to a 100-hour simulation of real-life conditions, including a direct-current source of electricity that emulated a solar power system, with rapid ramp-ups and ramp-downs in power typical of an intermittently cloudy day, as well as a realistic, changing load typical of a residence that the inverter needed to supply. Each inverter had to meet most of the same specifications required of commercially-available inverters.

The Red Electrical Devils were declared the winner by a consensus of judges from Google, the IEEE Power Electronics Society, and NREL. 

"The Little Box Challenge actually forced people to try to optimize space, and a nice outcome of that is that some of the techniques to do that are going to be pretty helpful for other aspects of inverter development," said Lundstrom. 

"For example, once you have a device that is almost entirely integrated onto a printed circuit board, it's easier to manufacture. Plus, some of the teams were able to incorporate all this innovation without adding any additional cost to the inverter and in some cases these designs may result in reduced inverter cost when mass-produced."

Shrinking inverters by an order of magnitude and making them cheaper to produce and install will enable more solar-powered homes and more efficient distribution grids, while helping bring electricity to remote areas.

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