1. Electrical energy splitting

The Power Electronics section is built around a reduced scope of technical and scientific notions, around electrical conversion itself. It is understood that upstream electrical energy is already available, and that the aim of conversion is to supply downstream electrical energy. The conversion is carried out by so-called power converters, even when this power is very small. It is explained here that, for reasons of efficiency, these converters use a principle of energy chopping. This section does not cover the conversion of primary energy into electrical energy, such as photovoltaic principles. However, these principles are very often intimately linked to a converter as discussed in this section.

A voltage or current converter can no longer use a linear structure for efficiency reasons. Let's consider the simple case of generating power at 50 V DC voltage from...