Advances in power electronics-its impact on the environment

Power electronics is one of the fastest changing and evolutionary technologies in electrical engineering in the recent years. This last decade of the 20th Century can be truly defined as the era of power electronics-or more truly, power electronics and information era. The solid-state power electronics revolution (often called the second electronics revolution) started by the invention of the thyristor in the late 1950s, and then continued ceaselessly by invention of many power devices, such as GTOs, triacs, BJTs, power MOSFETs, IGBTs, SITs and MCTs. The advent of new devices and the dramatic improvement of their ratings and characteristics gave a solid foundation for power electronics which resulted in the development of many power converter topologies, analytical and simulation techniques, variable frequency drives, and their control and estimation methods. As a result, the cost of power electronics apparatus fell significantly and their performance improved considerably, which correspondingly, spurred the dramatic surge of power electronics applications everywhere. This contributed to the present era of global industrial automation. Besides the improvement of industrial productivity and product quality, recently another dimension of the importance of power electronics-energy conservation and the corresponding control of environmental pollution-has been realized.