Thierry A. Meynard

In the past decades, climate concern has been growing and electric energy has been identified as one of the key players in the energy transition. Meanwhile, the status of multilevel converters has evolved from ‘new’ to ‘established’ concept with industrial products in each power decade from 1W to 10MW.

Choosing the best semiconductor has thus become more and more difficult because the choice is not guided by the voltage and current to handle: devices with a reduced voltage rating or with a reduced current rating can be respectively connected in series or parallel to build multilevel converters with improved performances: better efficiency, higher power density and/or reduced cost.

To help designers make the right decision, specific methods can be used and design tools have been developed. This includes unified formalism for series-, parallel- and series-parallel- multilevel converters to allow analytic models for pre-design, unified simulation models for easy comparison of simulated waveforms, and modular approach of prototype construction.

In this talk, design tools of different levels of complexity and accuracy that can be used to aid the designer at different stages of the design process will be presented.

Biography:

Thierry A. Meynard graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Electrotechnique, d’Electronique, d’Hydraulique de Toulouse in 1985, became a Doctor of the Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse, France, in 1988 and was then an invited researcher at the Université du Québec à Trois Rivières, Canada, in 1989. He joined the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) as a full-time researcher in 1990, was Head of the Static Converter Group from 1994 to 2001. From 2010 to 2018 he has been associate director of the national program 3DPHI (3-Dimensional Power Hybrid Integration). He is now Directeur de Recherches CNRS at the LAPLACE⁽*⁾ and Fellow of the IEEE, but in parallel he has been also involved in several industry-related activities.

Thierry A. Meynard has been part-time consultant with Cirtem from 2000 to 2016. In 2016 he co-founded and became scientific advisor at the company Power Design Technologies that develops PowerForge, the software for design of 2- and multi-level power converters later acquired by Gamma Technologies. Since January 2020, he is also acting as an independant consultant to transfer more innovation into industrial products.

His main research interests are related to series and parallel multicell converters, magnetic components and the development of design tools for power electronics.

T.A. Meynard is co-inventor of several topologies of multilevel converter used by ABB, Alstom, Cirtem, General Electric, Schneider Electric : ‘Flying capacitor’, ‘Stacked MultiCell’, ‘5LANPC’, ‘AC/AC chopper’, xPlexed choppers….

 ⁽*⁾ Laboratoire Plasma et Conversion d’Energie, UMR CNRS n° 5213, B.P. 7122, 2, rue Camichel, 31071 Toulouse Cedex 7 FRANCE

http://power-conversion.enseeiht.fr/

Email:

Address:Laboratoire Plasma et Conversion d’Energie, UMR CNRS n° 5213, B.P. 7122, 2, rue Camichel, 31071 Toulouse Cedex 7 FRANCE, , FRANCE, France