Research

Overview

Power electronics supply, convert, and control electrical energy, and their advancement is critical to both technological progress and energy sustainability. Next-generation technologies in renewable energy, electric transportation, manufacturing, consumer electronics, computing, healthcare, and more demand power electronics with ever-increasing efficiency and performance with ever-decreasing size and cost. Major advances in these directions have been enabled by wide-bandgap semiconductors and digital control, but further progress in the miniaturization and performance of power electronics is bottlenecked by passive components, particularly magnetics such as inductors and transformers. While magnetics have been integral to power electronics since the field’s inception, they pose fundamental power density and efficiency challenges at small scales. 

Our group pursues order-of-magnitude-scale advances in the miniaturization and performance of power electronics by developing and utilizing alternative passive component technologies that scale advantageously to small sizes. We are currently exploring a new class of power electronics based on piezoelectric passive components, which offer very high efficiency capabilities and energy densities multiple orders of magnitude greater than those of magnetics at small scales. Piezoelectric passive components can be realized as single-port piezoelectric resonators (PRs) or multiport piezoelectric transformers (PTs). Importantly, piezoelectrics exhibit inductive impedance for a finite frequency range above their resonant frequencies, enabling them to provide high-efficiency behaviors for power converters such as zero-voltage switching.

Our team's research spans "the full stack": developing piezoelectric passive components for power conversion, developing power converter circuit topologies and control for best utilizing piezoelectric components, and applying piezoelectric-based power converters to a variety of systems and applications. Our work is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing on expertise in power, circuits, control, acoustics, MEMS, and fabrication. Piezoelectric passive components are positioned to enable significant miniaturization, performance, and cost advances for power electronics in a wide variety of applications, and we are interested in exploring this for solar photovoltaics, electric vehicles, consumer electronics, communication systems, robotics, medical devices, and more. 

Select Publications

 For a full list, see Prof. Boles's Google Scholar profile.

• J. D. Boles, J. J. Piel, E. Ng, J. E. Bonavia, B. M. Wanyeki, J. H. Lang, and D. J. Perreault, “Opportunities, progress, and challenges in piezoelectric-based power electronics,” in IEEJ Journal of Industry Applications, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 254-263, 2023.

• J. D. Boles, J. J. Piel, E. Ng, J. E. Bonavia, J. H. Lang, and D. J. Perreault, “Piezoelectric-based power conversion: recent progress, opportunities, and challenges,” in Proc. IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), Newport Beach, CA, USA, Apr. 2022. 

• J. D. Boles, J. E. Bonavia, J. H. Lang, and D. J. Perreault, “A piezoelectric-resonator-based dc-dc converter demonstrating 1 kW/cm^3 resonator power density,” in IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 2811-2815, 2023.

• J. D. Boles, E. Ng, J. H. Lang, and D. J. Perreault, “Dc-dc converter implementations based on piezoelectric transformers,” in IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics, vol. 10, no. 6, pp. 6754-6769, 2022.

• J. D. Boles, J. E. Bonavia, P. L. Acosta, Y. K. Ramadass, J. H. Lang, and D. J. Perreault, “Evaluating piezoelectric materials and vibration modes for power conversion,” in IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 3374-3390, 2022. 

• J. D. Boles, J. J. Piel, and D. J. Perreault, “Enumeration and analysis of dc-dc converter implementations based on piezoelectric resonators,” in IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 129-145, 2021.

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