Competition-Based Learning of Power Converter Design Emulating Product Development Activity

Power conversion technology is characterized by the comparatively small variation of circuit topologies. Because product competitiveness mainly lies in the performance quality as efficiency and low noise emission, the professional skills of this technology commonly require the ability to improve the quality under the restriction of the space, the material resource, and the cost. The conventional teaching method of the power conversion technology is mainly based on the lecture classes and the hands-on classes, which teach the fixed knowledge of the circuit operation. Therefore, this conventional method tends to be insufficient to cover the various practical strategies to improve the quality. To overcome this difficulty, this paper proposes application of the competition-based learning (CBL), in which teams of the students design their power converters and compete on the efficiency. For many professional engineers, competition among companies is the basic motivation to think of strategies to improve product competitiveness. Therefore, the CBL may be effective for teaching design strategies. For promotion of sharing the know-how, the proposed teaching method introduces the events, in which each team share its design strategies with other teams and improve its design based on the know-hows of other teams These events emulate the economic activity, in which a company investigates its competitors' products to extract the know-how. Along with the basic methodology of the proposed teaching method, this paper also reports the experience of a teaching course.