Power electronics are vital to the technological progress of several major industries such as transportation, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and information technology. Demand for power electronics to be smaller volume, lighter weight, and lower cost often motivates designs that better utilize a converter's energy storage components (e.g. magnetics). However, further advances in converter miniaturization will eventually require new energy storage mechanisms with fundamentally higher energy density and efficiency capabilities. This prompts investigation into piezoelectric resonators (PRs), which have particularly advantageous scaling properties in this regard. This talk will explore the realm of practical, low-loss dc-dc converter implementations that utilize single PRs as their only energy storage components. Initial experimental findings suggest that these PR-based converters are promising alternatives to those based on traditional energy storage mechanisms and therefore may be a route to high performance converter miniaturization.

Jessica Boles is a PhD student in the Power Electronics Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her research spans converter architectures, energy storage components, and control techniques. Her most recent work has focused on dc-dc converters based on piezoelectric resonators, which received a Best Paper Award at the 2019 IEEE Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics (COMPEL). She completed the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she developed a battery storage system emulator for a power electronics-based grid testbed. Outside of research, she has led several initiatives for empowering women in engineering and facilitating healthy research advisor/advisee relationships in academia.