Welcome to course one,
Introduction to Power Electronics.
I'm Professor Bob Erickson.
I'm in the Department of Electrical Computer and Energy Engineering at
the University of Colorado at Boulder and I
co-direct the Colorado Power Electronics Center.
I want to briefly discuss just a few of the practical aspects regarding this course.
So, first of all,
we have an optional textbook that is written by me
and one of my colleagues teaching this course called Fundamentals of Power Electronics.
It's listed here.
You don't have to buy any textbook to take this course and we
will post slides and have videos for all of the material in the course.
Course will closely follow some of the chapters of this textbook.
The assumed prerequisite knowledge for this course is that you've
taken a sequence of circuits and
electronics courses such as that that
an undergraduate electrical engineering major would take.
Of course, you don't have to take any courses in order to sign up through Coursera.
However, when we teach this material on campus,
we find that those students who don't have this prerequisite knowledge
do have difficulty in the course and especially starting in the second week.
Just for reference, here is the curriculum
in power electronics that we teach at the University of Colorado.
We have our professional certificate in power electronics that
consists of three semester-long courses in this area.
So, this certificate will cover at
a fairly fast pace the first semester-long course called Introduction to
Power Electronics and the certificate also has
some material out of the second course on Modeling and Control of Power Electronics.
For reference, we also teach a sequence of
four courses that leads to a professional certificate in
Electric Drive Train Technology for
electric vehicles including Basic Power Electronics for electric vehicles,
an AC Motor Drive course,
and some Battery Management courses.
Then finally, we also teach a laboratory course in which students build
a standalone solar power system including the power electronics.
This course will have one homework assignment per
week and to pass the homework assignment,
you have to get at least 70 percent of the questions correct.
We do allow unlimited attempts and I think trying
the homework again is one of the real ways that you learn in the course.
So, you may attempt the homework, get questions wrong,
you get instantly graded,
machine grading and you can see where you went wrong and try again.
We have not watered down the course.
This is full strength and the homework assignments
are of a fairly high and challenging level.
So, these are real assignments such as ones that we would
give to our on-campus students integrated course.
There are also in-video quizzes that are very short questions.
These are not graded,
you don't have to do them to get credit for the course but they do
reinforce specific points that are related to the lecture and I think they are useful.
So, what's on the Coursera website?
We have the recorded lectures.
These lectures are arranged in one week modules.
So, there are three modules for this first Introduction to Power Electronics course.
Also linked are the slides used in each lecture,
there are the homework assignments, one per module,
we have some solved sample problems that can help in
understanding the homework and there are simulation files on the website as well.
So, for the first week of class,
your assignment is to view the lectures for module one and then do
the module one homework assignment which is on
simulation of a boost converter using LTSpice.