This 99.7% Inverter Breakthrough Can Revolutionize Solar & EVs!

I just found a company that could revolutionize everything from solar panels home batteries and electric vehicles and no I'm not talking about batteries which I talk about a lot I'm talking about inverters the magical devices that convert direct current found in everything from solar panels wind turbines and batteries into alternating current which is used in electric motors and our homes current inverter efficiencies top out between 95 and 99% but a publicly traded company called Hillcrest energy ticker symbol hrtf says they might have figured out the Holy Grail for inverters a technology called zero voltage switching and they say their inverters are 99.7% efficient that difference may not seem that big but it is an absolute Game Changer so how does it work and how impactful will this breakthrough be let's figure this out together I'm Ricky and this is Tu bit [Music] Vinci huge thanks to Hillcraft Energy Technologies for partnering with us to help us make this episode I had the pleasure of chatting with Harold hanenberger an electrical engineer and member of the hilcrest Energy Technologies team obviously my first question for him was why is zero voltage switching considered the holy grail for inverters and how is his team able to solve it this is a question we are asked uh uh again and again and it's very hard to answer actually you know um soft switching is or zero voltage switching is known from dcdc converters as well the principle of zps inverter is not completely new but you know sometimes you need the right ch chips that took a very long while uh you need the right microcontrollers and maybe you as well need the right uh team and the right time a key element to this stock market opportunity is that the company has patented IP to protect this transformational technology and has spent about $20 million developing it and yet its market cap is only slightly above that amount but before we talk about how big an impact this Tech can have let's talk about how it works if we measure the voltage of this solar panel on an oscilloscope this is what we'd see a constant value of around 35 volts direct current but if we did the same thing on one of the legs of our home electrical panel we'd see something very different the voltage would be 120 volts but you'll notice that the voltage varies in forms a sine wave this is alternating current and this is why the solar panels at top our roofs need one of these an inverter inverters are needed in everything from home batteries like this one or this one to electric vehicles where they invert the DC from the batteries into AC for AC Motors now if you take a battery and swap the positive and negative ends back and forth we get a square step wave that looks a bit like our AC sine wave but an inverter does this with a series of switches called igbts in a clever Arrangement instead of swapping the battery terminals we can create a system with four switches and a controller to control them if we close switches 1 and two the current flows in the forward direction through our AC load to switch the direction we just open switches 1 and 2 and close switches 3 and four now current flows through the AC load in the opposite direction ction using a technology called pulse width modulation we can create a smooth sine wave without actually changing the voltage by pulsing when and how long the switches are open and closed we can break down one complete cycle into segments starting with a short duration pulse followed by a series of increasing duration pulses reaching a maximum and then working our way back again now if we look at the average value in each of these segments we'll begin to see our sine wave and the more segments we create the smoother it'll be this is referred to as the switching frequency and we'll get back to that in a moment the two main sources of inverter energy losses come from conduction losses and switching losses conduction losses happen in all electronic components and it's a function of the materials like copper a very good but not perfect conductor to address conduction losses Technologies based on Silicon such as super Junction mosfets are used in modern inverters the big breakthrough that Hillcrest Energy Technologies made addresses the second type of losses that come from switching now switching doesn't actually happen instantaneously it takes a very small amount of time like 100 NS so the voltage graph during the switch actually looks like this if we look at the voltage over the switch as it opens it rises over the switching duration this current drops to zero as the switch is fully open since power is current time voltage the power is zero when the voltage is zero here and when the current is zero here so then our switching losses happen in this transitory period in this area under the current and voltage curves this power is lost as heat during the switching process and results in lower efficiency and added heat that the inverter has to dissipate and remember that this switching loss happens each and every time the switches change state so it scales up with higher switching frequency and this is the engineering trade-off that inverters have to make to increase performance with higher switching frequency while minimizing losses and waste heat modern inverters switch around 10,000 khz or 10,000 times per second which has historically been a sweet spot we can reduce switching losses by either reducing the voltage or current during switching this is called zero voltage switching and zero current switching respectively and while this concept has been pursued for some time Hillcrest energy technology says they've done it using novel Control software algorithms the hard switching is an inverter which switches an an an a chip part that means it turns it on no matter what happens and it turns it off the same way we use a zps technology that means zero voltage switching we turn on or turn off the switches when the voltage across the switch is zero or the current is zero therefore knowing that uh electrical power is the the product of current times uh voltage if one of both is zero the the the power is zero here are some of the benefits that this provides one material elimination of diode reverse recovery current spikes two the reduction of overshoot which protects devices reduces ringing significantly and therefore electromagnetic interference and three the material elimination of risk associated with the Miller effect due to the fact that we have a soft switching Behavior we have a very smooth transition a very slow I call it slow even if it happens below 100 NS okay but it's extremely smooth it has no ringing no overshoot this overshoot and this ringing during the the switching processes causes Emi and that's a disturbance that you can can measure everywhere in the in the in the lines that's the conducted Emi more or less which every other device in the vehicle or connected to the inverter is seeing in an EV their inverter could result in up to 15% reduction in the size of the battery pack and result in efficiency gains of up to 133% at the motor during partial loads remember that most inverter ratings are at Peak output and when you're cruising around the city at 40 mph you're only using a very small portion of the available power interestingly car makers are actually more interested in what this technology means for electromagnetic interference because it results in up to 50% reductions in the size of DC link capacitors and Emi shielding and filters in the system this could lead up to 300 lb in weight savings from the battery pack and up to $1,500 in battery cost savings and an overall $2,200 reduction in the cost of an EV just by switching to the zvs inverter what's really amazing is that they achieved this not with super expensive rare materials but with control algorithms and software they believe their inverters can be at Price par with today's inverters leading to a no compromise solution this is a classic example of when Technologies converge for better and better inverters we need more powerful Hardware more powerful processors and we're kind of sitting at a perfect storm where all that's coming together here's a look at some internal testing performed by Hillcrest energy on traditional hard switching inverters versus their zero voltage switching inverter as the switching frequency increases you'll see that the hard switching power losses increase pretty dramatically but the zvs inverter can ramp up switching frequency with minimal effects but it's not just electric vehicles this next part is important for fans of the company and potential investors to truly understand on a 250 megaw solar farm if we increased efficiency by 2% that would result in additional 13.2 million in Revenue over the lifetime of the plant as the world moves to more Renewables like wind and solar batteries and EVS the global inverter Market is going to increase in a big way Hillcrest projects that the global inverter Market will be $117 billion by 2029 now these are the early days and there there will be further testing and development required but a key next step is joint Partnerships like the recent one they signed with ocean batteries to deploy zvs inverters in Grid connected energy storage solutions this is a really exciting breakthrough and one I'm going to be watching closely I'm going to try to reach out to the team and get some access to tour their facilities and get some hands-on experience with their zvs inverters so definitely subscribe and like this video because you're not going to want to miss that but if you're curious about hillc crust Energy Technologies which trades in the US with the ticker symbol hrtf or want to learn more about the company or their stock read their reports or white papers we'll put links to all that material in the video description you can also reach out to the co-founder of the company who serves as CEO Mr Don cury and actually speak with him directly like many shareholders do that's a quick look at the zvs inverter I'm Ricky D Vinci and until next week check out this video next

Channel: Two Bit da Vinci

Views: 94,745

Keywords: two bit da vinci, This Inverter Breakthrough Can Revolutionize Solar & EVs!, zero voltage switching, hillcrest energy technologies, hillcrest energy, zero voltage switching explained, inverter breakthrough, evs, breakthrough inverter, most efficient inverter, inverter efficiency, zero voltage switching inverter, zero current switching inverter, zero current switching, ac dc, ad/dc, inverters, best inverter, This 99.7% Inverter Breakthrough Can Revolutionize Solar & EVs!

Id: 2JxbNi4lnUw

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 23 2024