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Opcondys’ Next-Generation Power Electronics

Co-founded by the husband-and-wife team of Dr. Stephen and Kristin Sampayan using equipment accumulated over lifetimes dedicated to electrical and mechanical engineering, Opcondys aims to enable the next generation of power electronics. Their device — known as the Optical Transconductance Varistor, or OTV — could fundamentally change how power is switched across the U.S. electrical grid and enable greater penetration of renewable energy sources. Watch this video to learn more.

Topics:
Batteries Electrification Electronics Energy Power

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:03 the U.S economy is more dependent on reliable affordable electricity than ever before as the nation adds energy storage capabilities our grid is under increasing strain due to increasing demand extreme weather events and outages using technology originated at Lawrence Livermore National Lab hopcondus is a

    00:00:21 power electronic startup offering a crucial solution for power grade reliability we're developing a new photonically controlled power electronic device for high voltage it relies on the photoconductive properties of silicon carbide so it switches much faster which means it can be more energy efficient it can handle much higher voltages than existing

    00:00:45 semiconductor devices what we're building is a device that responds to the control of the laser so it not only turns on and off if you take the laser and change the intensity of the laser it will change its resistance according to the laser line thereby controlling the current flow through it we're working out of our home mainly because taking on a business like this

    00:01:12 is a big risk and we already had a lot of the material and equipment and infrastructure just in our garage and so we thought well a good place to start is right here at home the technology actually comes out of a program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory they were looking at using silicon carbide for doing photoconductive switching which is a

    00:01:37 very fast switching technology my husband Steve realized as they started working with this material is that it responded differently than other photoconductive materials do in that it responded proportionally to the light that was shown on it and so they realized that this could be used as a power electronic device so the laboratory license the technology and

    00:02:01 made it available for a company to develop commercially I had some business background I decided well we'll form a company and we'll do it ourselves not very many people know where the word transistor comes from but it comes from transconductance varistor well we coined the word Optical transconductance Barista or OTV to basically show that this was a device that could control

    00:02:25 Power just like a transistor grid you can put a huge voltage across one of these devices by comparison and the device responds immediately there's no delay through the device as you see with a standard high voltage mosfet and what we have done here in opconus is bring it to the point that it becomes manufacturable and and reproducible the question was how do you take something

    00:02:52 that's like the sizeable room and get it down into a package we found the perfect facility we were just in the middle of getting it fixed up and ready to move into when covet hit it has taken much longer than we expected and Ovid has dragged that out even longer we're probably just a few months from having all of the construction done we

    00:03:14 need to to get done and then we can fully move in and fully start to work out here it's a really big area that we would like to see it adopted in is equipment for the electrical grid and our device can switch at much higher voltages and be paralleled essentially to any current that needs to be handled so we see better control of the grid that increases the Grid's reliability

    00:03:38 and resiliency if widely adopted on the energy grid OTV could save 1 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and eliminate 750 tons of greenhouse gases each year we have a technology I'm convinced that will revolutionize the power switching industry there's nothing like it there's nothing that comes close to it foreign