Free online coursePower Electronics

Course Description

Power electronics sits at the heart of modern electrical systems, from efficient chargers and LED drivers to solar inverters, motor drives, EV powertrains and industrial power supplies. This free online course is designed to help you understand how energy is converted, controlled and delivered with high efficiency, and how practical design tradeoffs shape real equipment. Whether you are strengthening your electrician skill set, moving toward power supply and drives work, or simply want to understand what happens between a source and a load, you will develop a clear, engineering-minded view of switched power conversion.

You will connect fundamentals to practice by exploring the behaviors that matter most in the field: rectification and ripple, load regulation, and power factor considerations that influence system performance and compliance. As the course progresses, you will build intuition for DC/DC conversion by comparing topologies and operating modes, including what changes when conduction becomes discontinuous and why control and component selection must adapt. You will also develop a practical feel for magnetics, learning why cores gap, how non-ideal transformers differ from ideal models, and how high-frequency effects like skin effect impact losses and layout decisions.

Beyond basic conversion, you will examine isolated converters and the role of transformers in improving safety, flexibility and design options. You will learn why switching losses occur, how snubbers are used to protect devices and reduce stress, and how thermal modeling and heat sinking influence reliability. The course then expands into inverter design and waveform synthesis, including strategies that reduce distortion and improve performance, and it introduces three-phase power conversion concepts commonly encountered in industrial and grid-connected systems.

To help you move from circuits to systems, the course also addresses averaged modeling, state-space techniques and the control concepts used to regulate converters without getting lost in switching detail. Practical topics such as current-mode control, EMI filtering and measurement considerations are included so you can better anticipate noise issues and build designs that behave well outside the schematic. Finally, you will explore switched-capacitor conversion, soft-switching and resonant power conversion, along with gate drive and layout decisions that often determine whether a design succeeds. Throughout, short exercises reinforce the reasoning behind key choices so you can apply the concepts confidently in real installations, troubleshooting and power-conversion projects.