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International audience; A fast and general Partial Element Equivalent Circuit (PEEC) method based on the Fast-Fourier-Transform (FFT) is proposed for the first time. The numerical tool only requires common CAD data input files (e.g. .stl format), then the discretization process is performed automatically by means of a fast voxelization technique based on ray intersection, thus drastically reducing the human effort required to setup the model. The method allows for considering at the same time inductive and capacitive effects, and is focused on power electronics applications where propagation effects can be neglected, whereas all the other electromagnetic phenomena are considered. Specifically, the proposed method is particularly suited for problems where both electric and magnetic fields are equally important and therefore quasistatic approximations do not apply. An ad-hoc preconditioner which significantly speeds-up the solver is also proposed and, thanks to the FFT, both memory and computation time are significantly reduced, without the need of applying data compression. Both linear and non-linear materials are considered by the proposed FFT-PEEC method. Sample implementation of the method is made publicly available.

Destroying superfluidity is a fundamental process and in fermionic superfluid such as He3-B it splits Cooper pairs into thermal excitations, quasiparticles. At the lowest temperatures, a gas of these quasiparticle excitations is tenuous enough for the propagation to be ballistic. We describe here an exploitation of the ballistic quasiparticles as the "photons"to observe the local destruction of superfluid He3-B by a mechanical resonator. We use a 5 by 5 pixel quasiparticle camera to image an emergence of quasiparticle excitations and a tangle of quantized vortices accompanying the pair-breaking. The detected quantum tangle is asymmetric around the mechanical resonator and is governed by the stability of vortices on the resonator surface. The vortex distribution shows that a conventional production of a quantum tangle via repetitive emission of vortex rings starts on the top surface of the generator and spreads around whole surface at high velocity when escaping vortex rings get retrapped by the moving resonator.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the influence of the position of a DC/DC static converter between a source and a load with regard to the conducted EMC emissions measured on the source. An experimental model was established through the analysis of relevant stresses, such as the variation in the lengths of the source-converter, converter-load cables and the impact of the shield connection. Through this study, it was observed that the circuit was sensitive to too large variations in the capacities of common mode and of the link, and the results obtained make it possible to confirm the reality of the electromagnetic pollution of the static DC/DC converter "Buck" as a function of connections. The results of this research can be used in DC/DC network designs based on buck converters.

The interior-point method (IPM) has become the workhorse method for nonlinear programming. The performance of IPM is directly related to the linear solver employed to factorize the Karush--Kuhn--Tucker (KKT) system at each iteration of the algorithm. When solving large-scale nonlinear problems, state-of-the art IPM solvers rely on efficient sparse linear solvers to solve the KKT system. Instead, we propose a novel reduced-space IPM algorithm that condenses the KKT system into a dense matrix whose size is proportional to the number of degrees of freedom in the problem. Depending on where the reduction occurs we derive two variants of the reduced-space method: linearize-then-reduce and reduce-then-linearize. We adapt their workflow so that the vast majority of computations are accelerated on GPUs. We provide extensive numerical results on the optimal power flow problem, comparing our GPU-accelerated reduced space IPM with Knitro and a hybrid full space IPM algorithm. By evaluating the derivatives on the GPU and solving the KKT system on the CPU, the hybrid solution is already significantly faster than the CPU-only solutions. The two reduced-space algorithms go one step further by solving the KKT system entirely on the GPU. As expected, the performance of the two reduction algorithms depends intrinsically on the number of available degrees of freedom: their performance is poor when the problem has many degrees of freedom, but the two algorithms are up to 3 times faster than Knitro as soon as the relative number of degrees of freedom becomes smaller., 21 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables

We describe a new type of torsional oscillator, suitable for studies of quantum fluids at frequencies of ∼ 100 Hz, but capable of reaching high velocities of up to several cm\,s−1. This requires the oscillator amplitude to exceed 100 μm, which is much too large for a conventional capacitor-driven device. We describe the new geometry for the oscillator, discuss its design, and report our initial tests of its performance.

Airborne Wind Energy systems (AWE) represent a promising solution to environmental challenges that has revolutionized research in the wind industry. The studied AWE system in this work is equipped with a multicopter drone in order to perform take-off and landingmaneuvers. An estimation strategy based on an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is proposed to obtain precise information regarding the state vector of the system, the unknown forces that acting on it and its aerodynamic coefficients.

This work uses design by optimization of power electronics converter to achieve the best Levelized Cost of Energy in a PV application. The methodology uses detailed models of power electronics active and passive components to determine the cost and performances of the solid-state energy conversion, and connect them to the system level vision. The deterministic algorithm used for converter sizing allows taking into account a large number of variables and constraints. Methodology, models and some illustrations of the results are provided in this paper.

We propose a novel feasible-path algorithm to solve the optimal power flow (OPF) problem for real-time use cases. The method augments the seminal work of Dommel and Tinney with second-order derivatives to work directly in the reduced space induced by the power flow equations. In the reduced space, the optimization problem includes only inequality constraints corresponding to the operational constraints. While the reduced formulation directly enforces the physical constraints, the operational constraints are softly enforced through Augmented Lagrangian penalty terms. In contrast to interior-point algorithms (state-of-the art for solving OPF), our algorithm maintains feasibility at each iteration, which makes it suitable for real-time application. By exploiting accelerator hardware (Graphic Processing Units) to compute the reduced Hessian, we show that the second-order method is numerically tractable and is effective to solve both static and real-time OPF problems., 7 pages, 3 figures, conference proceeding

International audience; Cet article compare le dimensionnement d'onduleurs 2 niveaux et 3 niveaux NPC en vue de la montée en tension dans le contexte aéronautique. Le dimensionnement s'effectue avec des méthodes d'optimisation déterministes. De nombreux modèles analytiques ont été choisis pour être compatibles avec l'algorithme d'optimisation. Parmi ces modèles, les équations permettant de calculer les pertes dans les interrupteurs sont développés ici. Un banc de mesure calorimétrique est utilisé pour valider ces modèles de perte. Les résultats d'optimisation permettent de comparer le dimensionnement d'un onduleur 2 niveaux et d'un onduleur NPC, et de discuter sur le bénéfice de la montée en tension.