Advanced Topics in Power Electronics

Course Description

Advanced Topics in Power Electronics covers advanced topics and trends in power electronics such as converter topologies for renewable energy and electric vehicle applications, grid synchronization, power and voltage control, multilevel converters, and wide-bandgap semiconductors. It is offered concurrently with EEL5245, with graduate students assigned additional work.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, EEL is the Electrical Engineering prefix. The University of West Florida publishes this at 3 semester hours through the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Science and Engineering. It is offered at approximately 4 Florida institutions.

⚠⚠ The SCNS title for this number is "Power Electronics"; UWF publishes it as "Advanced Topics in Power Electronics," and this difference genuinely matters. A course titled Power Electronics is normally the first course in the subject — rectifiers, choppers, inverters, and the switching fundamentals. UWF's is explicitly the advanced follow-on, and its prerequisite is EEE3308, an electronics course. A student expecting an introduction may find the course assumes converter fundamentals it does not teach. Confirm the starting point with the instructor, and carry a syllabus when transferring in either direction.

Power electronics is the technology that made the current energy transition possible, and that claim is not marketing. A solar panel produces DC at a voltage that varies with irradiance and temperature; a grid needs synchronised AC at a fixed frequency. A battery needs controlled charge and discharge. A motor needs variable frequency. Every one of those conversions is a switching converter, and improvements in the semiconductors doing the switching translate directly into efficiency, size, and cost across the whole system.

⚠ The wide-bandgap material named in the description is where the field is actually moving. Silicon carbide and gallium nitride devices switch faster and tolerate higher temperatures and voltages than silicon, which permits smaller magnetics and higher efficiency — and introduces electromagnetic interference and gate-drive problems that silicon designs did not have. That trade-off is the live engineering question in the field right now.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, prerequisites, and a description. It does not publish contact hours, a lecture and laboratory split, or terms of offering for any course. It does publish a material and supply fee notice on the minority of courses that carry one — and maintains a separate Material & Supply and Equipment Fees section of the catalog — so the absence of a fee notice on this entry is meaningful, while the fee amount is not published here. Every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is therefore derived. The figure here applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, giving 45 hours for a 3-semester-hour course. Confirm the meeting schedule with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe power semiconductor devices and their switching characteristics.
• Compare silicon, silicon carbide, and gallium nitride devices and their trade-offs.
• Analyse switching losses and conduction losses in a converter.
• Perform a thermal analysis and size a heat sink.
• Analyse DC-DC converter topologies: buck, boost, buck-boost.
• Analyse isolated converter topologies and their applications.
• Derive converter transfer characteristics in continuous and discontinuous conduction.
• Design converter passive components to a specified ripple.
• Analyse single-phase and three-phase inverter operation.
• Apply pulse width modulation strategies and compare them.
• Describe multilevel converter topologies and their advantages.
• Analyse harmonic content in converter output and evaluate filtering.
• Describe grid synchronisation and phase-locked loop operation.
• Describe grid-following and grid-forming inverter control.
• Design closed-loop control for a converter.
• Describe maximum power point tracking for photovoltaic converters.
• Describe converter topologies for electric vehicle traction and charging.
• Describe bidirectional converters and battery interface requirements.
• Describe gate drive requirements and their design constraints.
• Simulate a power electronic converter and interpret the results.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe soft-switching and resonant converter techniques.
• Describe electromagnetic interference and mitigation in converters.
• Describe magnetic component design for converters.
• Describe reliability and failure mechanisms in power electronics.
• Describe wireless power transfer.
• Describe solid-state transformers.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Power semiconductor devices and switching behaviour
• Wide-bandgap devices: SiC and GaN
• Switching and conduction losses
• Thermal management and heat sink sizing
• DC-DC converter topologies
• Isolated converters
• Continuous and discontinuous conduction modes
• Passive component design and ripple
• Single-phase and three-phase inverters
• Pulse width modulation strategies
• Multilevel converters
• Harmonics and output filtering
• Grid synchronisation and phase-locked loops
• Grid-following and grid-forming control
• Converter closed-loop control
• Maximum power point tracking
• Electric vehicle traction and charging converters
• Bidirectional converters and battery interfaces
• Gate drive design
• Converter simulation

Optional Topics

• Soft switching and resonant converters
• Electromagnetic interference and mitigation
• Magnetic component design
• Reliability and failure mechanisms
• Wireless power transfer
• Solid-state transformers

Resources & Tools

• Erickson and Maksimović, Fundamentals of Power Electronics — the standard graduate-level text and the reference the field works from; strong on converter modelling and control.
• Mohan, Undeland and Robbins, Power Electronics — the classic undergraduate text; the right place to fill gaps if you arrive without a first course in the subject.
• LTspice — free; excellent for switching converter simulation, and used in industry.
• PLECS — a free demo version is available; the specialist power electronics simulator, and much faster than SPICE for system-level converter work.
• MATLAB Simulink with Simscape Electrical — check UWF's campus licence; the standard tool for grid-connected converter control studies.
• PSIM — another specialist tool with academic access.
• Manufacturer application notes from Infineon, Wolfspeed, Texas Instruments, and onsemi — free, and genuinely the best current material on wide-bandgap device application; the textbooks lag the devices by years.
• IEEE Power Electronics Society — inexpensive student membership; IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics is the field journal.
• IEEE Std 1547 — the interconnection standard governing grid-connected inverters in the United States; check UWF Libraries for IEEE Xplore access.
• IEEE Std 519 — harmonic limits, and the reason converter output filtering is designed the way it is.

Career Pathways

• Electrical engineers — SOC 17-2071; power electronics is among the most consistently in-demand specialisms in the discipline.
• Electric vehicle powertrain and charging engineering — traction inverters, onboard chargers, and DC fast charging are all this course's material.
• Solar inverter and energy storage engineering — NextEra Energy Resources, headquartered in Florida, is among the world's largest solar and storage operators.
• Florida utilities — Florida Power & Light, Duke Energy Florida, TECO, JEA, OUC, Gulf Power; inverter-based resource integration is a growing engineering function.
• Aerospace and defence power systems — more-electric aircraft, directed energy, and shipboard power are power electronics problems. L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and the naval work at NSA Panama City in UWF's region.
• Motor drive and industrial automation — variable frequency drives are ubiquitous in manufacturing and in HVAC.
• Semiconductor manufacturers — applications engineering roles at device vendors.
• Power supply design — data centre and telecommunications power is a large and stable sector.
• ⚠ A practical note: this is hardware, and employers screen for it. If the course includes a build or a simulation project, document it — efficiency measurements and thermal data make a strong portfolio piece.

Special Information

⚠ Offered concurrently with the graduate EEL5245

• UWF teaches this alongside EEL5245, with graduate students assigned additional work. The pattern is routine at UWF and, across the corpus so far, is confined to 4000-level courses.
• The effect on an undergraduate is a section with graduate students in it and reading pitched to work at both levels. Undergraduate requirements are lower by design — the differential is in the additional graduate work, not in the shared material.
• For a student considering graduate study it is a useful preview, and the instructor sees the student working next to the standard they would be held to.

⚠⚠ The asterisk in a UWF prerequisite means the course may be taken at the same time

• UWF's catalog marks a concurrent course with an asterisk, defined on the catalog's Course Information page as: "This course may be taken prior to or during the same term."
• ⚠ This is the single most useful piece of notation in the UWF engineering catalog, and it is easy to miss. A prerequisite written without an asterisk must be completed first; one written with an asterisk may be taken in the same term.
• The practical effect is on time to degree. Reading an asterisked prerequisite as a hard prerequisite adds a term to the sequence for no reason, and in a tightly chained major like electrical engineering that error compounds down the whole plan.
• Confirm with an advisor before relying on it, and note that the registration system, not the catalog text, is what actually enforces the rule.

⚠⚠ The prerequisite is EEE3308, and it is an electronics course — not a power course

• UWF publishes EEE3308 as the sole prerequisite, and it is not asterisked, so it must be completed before enrolling.
• ⚠ EEE3308 is an electronics course, so the assumed background is semiconductor devices and analogue circuits rather than power systems. No power systems course is required, which makes this available outside the power concentration.
• ⚠⚠ The title says "Advanced Topics," and the prerequisite does not require a first power electronics course. That combination is worth raising with the instructor before enrolling: a student arriving without converter fundamentals should ask how much is assumed and be prepared to read Mohan's introductory chapters independently.
• EEL3112 and a controls course are both genuinely useful here even though neither is required — the closed-loop control and grid synchronisation content assumes transform methods and feedback intuition.

⚠⚠ Where power electronics designs actually fail

• Thermal management, more often than anything else. A converter that works on the bench for thirty seconds and fails after ten minutes is a thermal problem, and losses that look small as a percentage become large in watts at high power.
• ⚠ Switching loss rises with switching frequency, which sets the fundamental trade-off in the field: higher frequency shrinks the magnetics and heats the switches. Every converter design is somewhere on that curve.
• ⚠⚠ Parasitics dominate at high frequency. Layout inductance that is irrelevant at 60 Hz causes destructive voltage overshoot at fast switching edges, and with wide-bandgap devices switching far faster than silicon, layout stops being a detail and becomes a primary design constraint.
• Gate drive is where wide-bandgap designs are most often lost. These devices demand tighter gate loops, careful drive voltages, and attention to false turn-on; a SiC device driven like a silicon MOSFET frequently fails.
• ⚠ Electromagnetic interference is a design requirement, not an afterthought. Fast edges radiate, products must pass conducted and radiated emissions testing, and a design that fails EMC is not shippable regardless of how efficient it is.
• Simulation omits the things that break real converters — parasitic inductance, thermal coupling, and gate drive non-idealities. Treat a clean simulation as a necessary condition, not a sufficient one.

⚠⚠ Laboratory and project safety at power levels

• Power electronics operates at voltages and energies that are genuinely dangerous, unlike the signal-level circuits in earlier courses. This is the point in the curriculum where electrical safety stops being precautionary.
• ⚠⚠ DC bus capacitors store lethal energy and remain charged after the supply is removed. Bleeder resistors are required, discharge must be verified with a meter before touching anything, and "I turned it off" is not verification.
• ⚠ Grid-connected work is a different risk category entirely. Isolation transformers, differential probes, and correct grounding are mandatory — connecting a standard oscilloscope ground to a non-isolated converter node creates a short circuit through the probe ground and is a well-known way to destroy equipment and injure people.
• Semiconductor failure is energetic. Devices fail explosively at power, and eye protection is not optional.
• Current-limit every supply and start at reduced voltage when bringing up a new converter.
• Never work alone at power, and know where the disconnect is.

Florida grid context worth carrying into this course

• Florida is close to an electrical peninsula. Its ties to the rest of the Eastern Interconnection run through a limited northern corridor, which constrains how much power can be imported during a shortfall and makes in-state generation and reserve margin unusually important.
• Summer and winter peaks are both air-conditioning and heating driven, and Florida's load shape is dominated by weather to a degree few states match.
• ⚠⚠ Hurricanes are a design condition here, not a contingency. Storm hardening, undergrounding, vegetation management, and mutual-aid restoration are ordinary parts of Florida utility engineering, and the restoration problem is a systems problem.
• Solar has grown very rapidly in Florida, and the state is now among the largest solar generators in the country — which puts the integration questions in these courses directly in front of in-state employers.
• The employers are named and local: Florida Power & Light (NextEra), Duke Energy Florida, TECO, JEA, OUC, and Gulf Power in UWF's own region, plus municipal and cooperative utilities across the state.
• ⚠ NERC reliability standards govern bulk power system operation, and compliance is a real job function — violations carry financial penalties.

FE exam relevance

The Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam is the first step toward Professional Engineer licensure, and in Florida it is administered under the Florida Board of Professional Engineers. Most students take the FE Electrical and Computer exam in their final year. Licensure matters less in electrical engineering than in civil — the industrial exemption means most electrical engineers in manufacturing and product work never need a PE — but it is required for consulting practice, for sealing designs, and for power and building-systems work, which is exactly where Florida's utility and infrastructure employment sits.

Course format and position in the curriculum

• Lecture with analysis assignments and simulation work, and frequently a design project.
• Typically taken in the fourth year, after EEE3308.
• Taught with graduate students in the room; expect the level to reflect that, and note that the "advanced topics" framing means content may vary between offerings as the field moves.
• ⚠ Ask what is assumed before enrolling, given the gap between the advanced title and the electronics-only prerequisite.
• UWF publishes no contact hours, lecture and laboratory split, or terms of offering for any course, and no material and supply fee is noted on this entry. Confirm the offering pattern with the department.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement. ⚠ For engineering specifically, ABET-accredited programmes commonly require that upper-division engineering coursework be taken in residence, so transferability of the credit and applicability to the degree are separate questions.

EEL4241 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida, offered concurrently with the graduate EEL5245. Because the SCNS title ("Power Electronics") implies an introductory course while UWF publishes this as an advanced one, students transferring credit should carry a syllabus.