Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Design and Validation Methodologies for Power Electronics Components and Systems

In the emerging and fast-evolving applications such as renewables, energy storage, power grids and electrified transportation, power electronic converters are imposed with growing size and power capacity, continuously dropping price per kilowatt, more complicated control functions, and more complex working conditions. Under this background, it is essential to accurately evaluate more aspects and details of performance metrics with high confidence levels for power electronics components and systems, such as efficiency, power density, temperature distribution, insulation, stability, and reliability. This paradigm shift calls for more advanced methods for the design and validation of power electronics components/systems, by means of finite element method (FEM)/hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) simulation, multiphysics/multitimescales modeling, mission profile emulation, design automation, and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the design targets are not only limited to power semiconductors but also for the passive components, software, test bench, and extensive parts of power electronics-related systems. This Special Issue timely serves to foster and collect new research achievements within the scope of advanced design and validation methods in the field of power electronics. We have received 93 submissions from 19 countries/regions, and after peer-reviewing, 55 of the submissions were finally accepted and included - this is one of the most popular special issues in IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics (JESTPE) for the last two years. The accepted papers can be categorized into six sections: 1) loss and thermal models; 2) monitoring and diagnosis techniques; 3) characterization and testing methods; 4) reliability estimation, validation, and manipulation; 5) mechanism and design of power electronics components; and 6) advanced design method for power electronics systems. © 2013 IEEE.