Hello, I’m Koh Ohno, a 1st-year master student at Hori-Fujimoto Laboratory.
The other day we finished the final day for the laboratory’s “Circuit Seminar for Newcomers”, so I’d like to introduce it as a part of the laboratory life.
“Circuit Seminar” is one of the hands-on lectures for newcomers at Hori-Fujimoto Laboratory, and it is aimed to acquire the minimum knowledge and basic skills required for the research on power electronics.
In the classes of Circuit Seminar, we learned the cursory history of power electronics and took lectures on the basic principles of the buck-boost converter and wireless power transfer. These pieces of knowledge are essential for newcomers because Hori-Fujimoto Laboratory conducts research on wireless power transfer on electric vehicles and power electronics.
We also learned practical skills through making wireless power transfer mini-4WD and buck converter.
Wireless power transfer mini-4WD is literally a mini-4WD without batteries that receive the provided power from the road with their attached inductors and run on that energy endlessly.
Every year the wireless power transfer mini-4WDs are exhibited in the “May Festival”, the school festival of the University of Tokyo, so please come and see if you are interested in it.
The second exercise, the fabrication of buck converter, is aimed to acquire the skills for soldering and circuit design. We design and fabricate rectifier, PWM oscillator and back-boost converter on prototyping board and check its function.
On the final day of Circuit Seminar, the operation and circuit quality of the buck converter are scored by the doctoral course students and professors, so this event puts a lot of pressure on newcomers.
This year the quality was especially high and some of them used PCB fabrication machines to achieve a high density of circuit elements.
More importantly, it was wonderful that all of the cirucuits of newcomers operated properly.
At the end of the final day, they were given presents according to the score of their circuits and got their efforts rewarded.
In this article, I introduced the Circuit Seminar, but in our laboratory, we have other seminars on control engineering, softwares for research and others every year, so we take a lot of care on the education for newcomers.
If you are interested in going to graduate schools, be it the Dept. of Advanced Energy or not, we recommend you to take into account the education for newcomers besides research area or its atmosphere
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Please note that the translation system may not necessarily be accurate.
Thank you in advance for your kind understanding.
