Design and implementation of a synchronous interleaved boost converter for fuel cell-powered catamaran

The present work describes the different stages of design, implementation, and validation procedures for an interleaved DC-DC boost converter intended for the 2022 Futura, a fuel cell-powered racing catamaran developed by the UniBoAT team. The main goal of the entire design has been the significant reduction of the weight of the converter by removing heat sinks and reducing component size while increasing its efficiency by adopting high-end power switches and the interleaved architecture operated with a synchronous control strategy. The obtained converter has been integrated into the structure containing the fuel cell stack obtaining a fully integrated system. The realized device has been based on an interleaved architecture with six phases controlled digitally through the average current mode control. The design has been validated through simulations carried out using the software LT-Spice, whereas experimental validations have been performed by means of laboratory bench tests and on-field tests. Detailed thermal and efficiency analyses are provided with the bench tests under the two synchronous and non-synchronous operating modes and with the adoption of the phase shedding technique. The prototype implementation and its performance in real operating conditions are also discussed. Eventually, it is underlined as the designed converter can be used in other applications requiring a voltage-controlled boost converter.

Gpu-based many-core architecture emulation: A double level approach

The efficient emulation of a many-core architecture is a challenging task, each core could be emulated through a dedicated thread and such threads would be interleaved on an either single-core or a multi-core processor. The high number of context switches will results in an unacceptable performance. To support this kind of application, the GPU computational power is exploited in order to schedule the emulation threads on the GPU cores. This presents a non trivial divergence issue, since GPU computational power is offered through SIMD processing elements, that are forced to synchronously execute the same instruction on different memory portions. Thus, a new emulation technique is introduced in order to overcome this limitation: instead of providing a routine for each ISA opcode, the emulator mimics the behavior of the Micro Architecture level, here instructions are date that a unique routine takes as input. Our new technique has been implemented and compared with the classic emulation approach, in order to investigate the chance of a hybrid solution.

On the influence of polymeric nanofibers in laminated composite materials. Studio dell'influenza di nanofibre polimeriche in materiali compositi laminati

During the last years an increased interest about the reinforcement of laminated composites by means of polymeric nanofibers has been growth. During this master-degree-thesis work, unidirectional and plane-textile composites have been interleaved with Nylon 6.6, PCL and mixed (Nylon 6.6+PCL) nanofibrous mats and the DCB (mode I interlaminar fracture toughness), ENF (mode II interlaminar fracture toughness and DMA (damping capability) tests have been performed. Regarding the interlaminar fracture toughness, marked increases have been recorded; while further investigation about damping capability is requested.