Re: Little Box Challenge
Yep. This is an interesting engineering problem, where the salient issues are:
Must have a DC-AC efficiency of greater than 95%
Must maintain a temperature of no more than 60°C during operation everywhere on the outside of the device that can be touched.
Must conform to Electromagnetic Compliance standards as set out in FCC Part 15 B
Can not use any external source of cooling (e.g. water) other than air
Must be in a rectangular metal enclosure of no more than 40 cubic inches
Must be able to handle up to 2 kVA loads
Electrically, this type of inverter exists: commercially available grid scale inverters have efficiencies around 97%+. The issue is fitting the whole package into a 40 cubic inch enclosure and keeping it cool (remember, there's up to 100W of heat to dissipate here). Unless the device efficiencies can be kept above ~98%, I suspect that forced air cooling will end up being used, as dissipating 100W in a 40 cubic inch enclosure with less than a 30C rise above ambient temperature is rather nontrivial with free convection.
