ReportBy Joseph CW Leung
For a sustainable smart city development, it is essential to increase building energy efficiency to reduce the impact on environment. In recent years, building with DC micro-grid, i.e. DC building, have been getting a lot of attention and applications as it shown substantial improvement on energy efficiency comparing with the AC counterpart.
The Electrical Division and MTR Academy co-organised the webinar on AC-DC Power Conversion Technology for Energy Efficient DC Buildings on 28 February 2022 to talk about the latest development and examples on power conversion technology. There were over 450 participants who attended the webinar which was delivered by Dr. River Tin-ho Li from ASTRI.
Dr. River Li is an experienced engineer in developing DC power technologies for smart city applications, who shared with us various AC-DC power conversion solutions including active and passive solutions. He also talked about the AC-DC power conversion solutions for DC building applications. Through the adoption of these technologies, it can fully unleash the effectiveness of renewable energy resource and storage to supply the loads without loss on excessive DC-to-AC and/or AC-to-DC conversions. However, electrical disconnection in DC voltage at substantial current may lead to serious arc which is highly unfavored to classic circuit breaker. Dr. Li introduced the latest technologies on DC power protection and furnished us with actual example of a solid-state DC circuit breaker solution that had been developed which could complete a disconnection in micro-second range without electrical arc.
In the webinar, the AC-DC power conversion solution with DC circuit breaker for building application was elaborated. It is believed that by adopting various power conversion technologies, we are able to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of renewable energy resource and storage in the DC building on the pipeline.
The session was wrapped up with a well handled question-and-answer session.
