Powerbox

Powerbox, one of Europe’s largest power supply companies and a leading force for four decades…

As is the case in many industries, power electronics has been affected by the Covid-19…

Powerbox, one of Europe’s largest power supply companies, and for more than four decades a…

Extracting clean energy from water has been a dream for more than a century and…

Powerbox, one of Europe’s largest power supply companies, and for more than four decades a…

Powerbox, one of Europe’s largest power supply companies, and for more than four decades a…

In the quest to increase power utilization efficiency and to achieve the computation of more…

Powerbox, one of Europe’s largest power supply companies, and for more than four decades a…

October 29, 2020, after seven months of silence due to a major upgrade of the 70-meter-wide radio antenna located in Camberra, NASA sent a set of commands to the 43 year-old spacecraft, Voyager 2 that has travelled billions of miles from earth since its launch in 1977. Voyager 2 acknowledged it had received the call and executed the commands without any issue. Interesting for sure – but what is the significance of this to power engineers?

From the very early days when power electronics equipment utilized vacuum tubes, power engineers have been concerned with energy efficiency, power optimization and how to make power supplies more reliable, smaller and smarter. Probably few of us remember the introduction of the Thyratron or the 1925 patent by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld for the Field Effect Transistor (picture 01 – picture 02), but the electronics industry is full of amazing inventions and innovations all contributing to achieving the mythical 99% efficiency level.