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The latest news from Research at Google
And the winner of the $1 Million Little Box Challenge is…CE+T Power’s Red Electrical Devils
Monday, February 29, 2016
Posted by Ross Koningstein, Engineering Director Emeritus, Google Research
In July 2014, Google and the
IEEE
launched the $1 Million
Little Box Challenge
, an open competition to design and build a small kW-scale inverter with a power density greater than 50 Watts per cubic inch while meeting a number of other specifications related to efficiency, electrical noise and thermal performance. Over 2,000 teams from across the world registered for the competition and more than 80 proposals qualified for review by
IEEE Power Electronics Society
and Google. In October 2015,
18 finalists were selected
to bring their inverters to the
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
(NREL) for testing.
Today, Google and the IEEE are proud to announce that the grand prize winner of the $1 Million Little Box Challenge is
CE+T Power
’s Red Electrical Devils. The Red Electrical Devils (named after
Belgium’s national soccer team
) were declared the winner by a consensus of judges from Google, IEEE Power Electronics Society and NREL. Honorable mentions go to teams from
Schneider Electric
and
Virginia Tech’s Future Energy Electronics Center
.
CE+T Power’s Red Electrical Devils receive $1 Million Little Box Challenge Prize
Schneider, Virginia Tech and The Red Electrical Devils all built 2kW inverters that passed
100 hours of testing at NREL
, adhered to the technical specifications of the competition, and were recognized today in a ceremony at the
ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit
in Washington, DC. Among the 3 finalists, the Red Electric Devils’ inverter had the highest power density and smallest volume.
Impressively, the winning team exceeded the power density goal for the competition by a factor of 3,
which is more than 10 times more compact than commercially available inverters
! When we initially brainstormed technical targets for the Little Box Challenge, some of us at Google didn’t think such audacious goals could be achieved. Three teams from around the world proved decisively that it could be done.
Our takeaway: Establish a worthy goal and smart people will exceed it!
Congratulations again to CE+T Power’s Red Electrical Devils, Schneider Electric and Virginia Tech’s Future Energy Electronics and sincere thanks to our collaborators at IEEE and NREL. The finalist’s technical approach documents will be posted on the
Little Box Challenge
website until December 31, 2017. We hope this helps advance the state of the art and innovation in kW-scale inverters.
Little Box Challenge Academic Awards
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations
Last July, Google and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Power Electronics Society (
IEEE PELS
) announced the
Little Box Challenge
, a competition designed to push the forefront of new technologies in the research and development of small, high power density inverters.
In parallel, we announced the Little Box Challenge
award program
designed to help support academics pursuing groundbreaking research in the area of
increasing the power density for DC-to-AC power conversion
. We received over 100 proposals and today we are proud to announce the following recipients of the academic awards:
Primary Academic Institution
Principal Investigator
University of Colorado Boulder
Khurram K. Afridi
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology
Huang-Jen Chiu
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
José A. Cobos
Texas A&M University
Prasad Enjeti
ETH Zürich
Johann W. Kolar
University of Bristol
Neville McNeill
Case Western Reserve University
Timothy Peshek
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Robert Pilawa-Podgurski
University of Stuttgart
Jörg Roth-Stielow
Queensland University of Technology
Geoff Walker
The recipients hail from many different parts of the world and were chosen based on their very strong and thoughtful entries dealing with all the issues raised in the
request for proposals
. Each of these researchers will receive approximately $30,000 US to support their research into high power density inverters, and are encouraged to use this work to attempt to win the $1,000,000 US grand prize for the Little Box Challenge.
There were many submissions beyond those chosen here that reviewers also considered to be very promising. We encourage all those who did not receive funding to still participate in the
Little Box Challenge
, and pursue improvements not only in power density, but also in the reliability, efficiency, safety, and cost of inverters (and of course, to attempt to win the grand prize!)
Academics and the Little Box Challenge
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations
Think shrink! Min it to win it! Smaller is baller! That's what the
Little Box Challenge
is all about: developing a high power density inverter. It’s a competition presented by Google and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Power Electronics Society (IEEE PELS) -- not only a grand engineering challenge, but your chance to make a big impact on the future of renewables and electricity.
With the rise of solar photovoltaic panels, electric vehicles (EV) and large format batteries, we’ve seen a resurgence in the
over-a-century-long feud
between Thomas Edison’s direct current (DC) and Nikola Tesla’s alternating current (AC). The electric grid and most higher power household and commercial devices use AC; batteries, photovoltaics, and electric vehicles work in DC. So the power electronics that convert between the two -- rectifiers (AC->DC), and inverters (DC->AC) -- are also gaining increased prominence, as well as the DC/DC and AC/AC converters that switch between different voltages or frequencies.
While different flavors of these devices have been around for well over a century, some of them are starting to show their age and limitations versus newer technologies. For example, conventional string inverters have power densities around 0.5-3 Watts/Inch
3
, and microinverters around 5 Watts/Inch
3
-- but lithium ion batteries can now get 4-10 Watt Hours/Inch
3
. So for a 1-2 hour battery pack, your inverter could end up being bigger than your battery -- a lot to carry around.
Some recent advances may change what’s possible in power electronics. For example,
Wide-bandgap
(WBG) semiconductors -- such as gallium-nitride (GaN) and silicon-carbide (SiC) -- not only enable higher power densities than conventional silicon-based devices do, but can also convert between DC and AC at higher temperatures, using higher switching frequencies, and with greater efficiency.
But even WBG materials and other new technologies for power electronics run into limits on the power density of inverters. Photovoltaic power and batteries suffer when they see oscillations on their power output and thus require some form of energy storage -- electrolytic capacitors store that energy and bridge the power differential between the DC input and the AC output, but that makes the devices much larger. Household and consumer devices also need to add filters to prevent electromagnetic interference, so that’s even more bulk.
When it comes to shrinking these devices, inverters may have the most potential. And because inverters are so common in household applications, we hope The Little Box Challenge may lead to improvements not only in power density, but also in reliability, efficiency, safety, and cost. Furthermore, it is our hope that some of these advances can also improve the other types of power electronics listed above. If these devices can be made very small, reliable and inexpensive, we could see all kinds of useful applications to the electric grid, consumer devices and beyond, maybe including some we have yet to imagine.
To recognize the role academics have played in pushing the forefront of new technologies, Google has taken a couple of special steps to help them participate:
Research at Google will provide unrestricted gifts to to academics pursuing the prize. This funding can be used for research equipment and to support students. Visit the
Little Box Challenge awards for academics
page for more info --
proposals are due September 30, 2014.
Academics often have trouble getting the latest technology from device manufacturers to tinker on. So Google has reached out to a number of WBG manufacturers who’ve put up dedicated pages detailing their devices. Check out the
Little Box Challenge
site to get started.
We hope you’ll consider entering, and please tell your colleagues, professors, students and dreamers -- you can print and post
these posters
on your campus to spread the word.
Data and code open sourced from Google's Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal project
Monday, January 30, 2012
Posted by Ross Koningstein, Engineer, Google RE<C team
Cross-posted
with the Open Source at Google Blog
Google’s
RE<C
renewable energy research project has recently open sourced a new tool and a significant amount of data to support future CSP (concentrating solar power)
heliostat
development.
HOpS Open Source Site
HOpS
,
h
eliostat
op
tical
s
imulation, is an open source software tool for accurately and efficiently performing optical simulations of fields of heliostats, the actuated mirror assemblies that direct sunlight onto a target in CSP applications.
Google used this tool to help
evaluate heliostat field layouts
and calculate heat input into a CSP receiver for power production. HOpS works by passing "packets" of light between optical elements (the sun, heliostats, and elements of the target surface), tracking shadowing and blocking masks along the way. For our analysis goals, this approach gave our researchers more flexibility and accuracy than analytic tools (such as DELSOL or HFLCAL), and it was easier to set up for thousands of runs than using ray tracers. Output from the simulation includes heliostat efficiency, target irradiance, and more, while an included shell script facilitates plotting heat maps of the output data using gnuplot.
REC-CSP Open Source Site
The
REC_CSP
open source project contains data sets and software useful for designing cheaper heliostats.
Available on the project site are:
1. Thirty days of three-dimensional wind measurement data taken with ultrasonic anemometers (sampled at ~7 Hz), recorded at several near surface elevations. The data is presented in the
RE<C wind data collection document
and is available for download on the open source site
here
.
2. A collection of
heliostat aerodynamic load data
obtained in a NASA wind tunnel and graphically represented in the
appendix
. This data is available for download on the open source site
here
.
3. Matlab software for high-precision, on-target heliostat control with built-in simulation for testing. This is essentially the same software used in the
RE<C heliostat control demonstrations
and described in the
accelerometer sensing
and
control system design
documents. The source code is available for download
here
.
Video: Demonstrating single and multiple heliostat control
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