Introduction to Power Electronics

International Journal of Electrical Engineering Education, Jan 1999 by Barnes, M

Introduction to Power Electronics: D. FEWSON

(Arnold, 1998, 192 pp., 14.99)

There has long been a need for a relatively cheap, simple introductory text to power electronics for undergraduates. Many of the more widely known books are really more suited to 3rd years, postgraduate students and research engineers. They give good basic grounding in the subject but are also filled with a lot of advanced material and some undergraduates can have difficulty in extracting the information they need.

Denis Fewson's book reduces the information to an easily manageable amount and puts together 192 pages of core material. The book is aimed firmly at introductory modules in the second year of an electrical engineering course and covers the material well. Particularly the sections on inverters, switched mode power supplies and thyristor/triac phase angle control are presented very clearly and succinctly. The large number of straightforward examples is particularly welcome. The only disappointing aspects of the book concern presentation. The mathematical equations are often typeset on one line so that it is not always immediately clear what is the numerator and what is the denominator. Also a few mistakes in the diagrams appear to have slipped into the final manuscript.

The book is based on Dr. Fewson's own second year course at Middlesex and I can only recommend it as well worth looking at for other lecturers who, like myself, teach power electronics at this level.

M. BARNES Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, UMIST