Powerbox

1980 – a pivotal point in the power industry!

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?

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On the road to 99% efficiency in a Smart World!

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.

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