Thompson Consulting
Dr. Marc Thompson is an Adjunct Associate Professor of
Electrical Engineering and teaches two different graduate courses at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in
The ability to see the simplicity in a complex design problem is a skill that is not usually taught in engineering classes. Some engineers, when faced with design problems, immediately fill up pages and pages of calculations, or do complex circuit simulations or finite-element analyses. One problem with this approach is that if you get an answer, you don't know if it is correct unless you have an intuitive feel for what the answer should be. The application of some simple rules-of-thumb and design techniques is a possible first step to developing intuition into the behavior of complex electrical systems. The course outlines some ways of thinking about analog circuits and systems that hopefully will help to develop intuition. The course is run as a graduate seminar, and discussion and debate is highly encouraged. The lectures are a mixture of instructional sessions covering new background material, and design case studies.
Material covered includes:
· Use of scaling laws, intuitive approaches and energy methods to simplify system design.
· Mechanical/electrical/thermal/magnetic circuit analogies. How to use circuit theory to predict behavior of other kinds of systems.
· Transistor amplifier design and amplifier bandwidth approximation techniques using open-circuit time constants and short-circuit time constants
· High gain amplifiers
· Switching transistor analysis using the charge-control model
· Magnetic and electromechanical circuits
· Switching power converter design and MOSFET switching speed estimation
· Design case studies
A link to the course syllabus for Spring 1999 is given here.
This is a graduate-level power electronics course, covering:
· Power electronic systems
· Device physics and characteristics of switching devices such as BJTs, MOSFETs, SCRs, IGBTs, diodes, etc.
· Rectifiers --- non-controlled (diode) and controlled (SCR) rectifiers and inverters
· DC/DC switching power converters (such as the buck, boost, buck/boost, flyback, forward, Cuk, SEPIC, etc.)
· Resonant converters
· Control issues; modeling, averaged and state-space models; discontinuous mode and current mode control.
· Motor modeling and control
· Practical design issues such as snubbers, gate drives, thermal design, and magnetic design.
The focus is on approximate design techniques, real-world case studies, and intuitive methods. There is judicious use of SPICE and MATLAB circuit simulations.
A link to the course syllabus for Fall 1998 is given here.
A link to the course syllabus for Fall 1999 is given here.
Material covered includes:
· Basics of analog signal processing
· Basics of power electronics
· Use of scaling laws
· Mechanical/magnetic/thermal circuit analogies
Marc T. Thompson, Ph.D.
President, Thompson Consulting, Inc.
Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
9 Jacob Gates Road, Harvard MA 01451
Email: marctt@aol.com
Business website: http://members.aol.com/marctt/index.htm
Links to TCI’s other webpages:
Home Page | Curriculum Vitae | Consulting Projects | Maglev Research at MIT | Teaching at WPI | Links
Copyright ©1998-2003, Marc T. Thompson
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