Under the safe cover of a small umbrella, ipXchange talks with Bruce from Pre-Switch in an unplanned lunchtime rendezvous. In front of him is a small box that contains one of the world’s first soft-switching inverters, qualified for automotive applications, and with 250 kW output and 98.5% efficiency at 5% load, we really needed to discuss this innovation.
Switching at 100 kHz, this inverter works around 10 times faster than what is commonly used for EVs today. To put Pre-Switch’s technology in context, they are leading the world in embedded AI to control the timing of circuits at 2-nanoseconds precision – this is the time taken for light to travel 2 feet! Additionally, AI-adaptive control of the soft switching across all performance conditions enables a flat efficiency curve across different loads, with efficiency peaking at 99.57%.
The benefit of such high switching frequency is the ability to make smaller, lighter, more efficient designs – the box in the video is approximately 1 litre in volume – with the additional bonus of motors performing much better at these high frequencies. Of course, Pre-Switch provides the software and the tools to implement this state-of-the-art soft-switching technology, but there’s a slight catch for the smaller-OEM engineers in our community…
Come on, you automotive engineers. Surely, one of you will fill in a form and get a conversation started about this range-extending EV solution.
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