element14 has added Panasonic Industry’s solar inverters and EV charging system components to their power portfolio. These best-in-class products help designers meet the growing global demand for sustainable and renewable energy mobility systems.
Panasonic Industry prioritises safety, compactness, and reliability for charging installations and domestic wall boxes. Its offerings span from PCB relays and a wide array of passive components to thermal interface materials and connectivity solutions, ensuring top-notch performance for renewable energy applications.
Panasonic products now available from element14 include:
• EZPV & ECWFG Series Film Capacitors are a line of compact metallised polypropylene film capacitors providing high reliability and high end-of-life safety and used for interference suppression. The outstanding feature of Panasonics film capacitors is the integrated safety function. An original in-house patterned metallisation process is the basis of a special structure which performs as a fuse mechanism that prevents the capacitor from experiencing short mode failure. Which makes them ideal for applications including input/output filtering for charging stations, the input side of on-board chargers, industrial power supplies, a range of EV/PHEV applications, and renewable energy infrastructure. They are ideal for solar inverters, wind power generation and onboard AC/DC and DC/AC automotive charging applications.
• ETQ-P*M SERIES Power Inductors offer high heat resistance, high efficiency and exceptional reliability for use in noise filtering in electronic drives, and as boost and buck converters as well as in DC/DC converters, all of which are crucial for automotive and other high stress applications. Solar inverters also require inductors that are capable of handling high voltages and large currents in the main circuit. Pansonic inductors, thanks to their high-quality design, can meet these requirements ensuring a stable inductance value during lifetime. In addition to the inductor's role in the primary circuit, power inductors are also used in the auxiliary circuit for the controller and gate drivers, where digital logic provides critical controlling and monitoring functions for solar energy harvesting systems. Since high switching speeds are employed and operating conditions can be harsh, high-performance power inductors such as the Panasonic Metal Composite ETQP family are required.
• ERJ-P Series High Power Anti-Surge Thick Film Chip Resistors offer the ability to use smaller case sizes while still maintaining the same level of power or better in respect to conventional size thick film resistors. Their surge characteristics are superior to standard metal film resistors. Excellent heat dissipation with optimised resistance pattern and resistance material, and the electrode design enables downsizing and a high-power rating. Panasonic resistors use soft termination technology. This means that by using a soft resin, the solder joint experiences less stress in temperature cycles and therefore, ensures minimum risk of solder joint cracks. This makes them ideal for EV Charging and Energy Management applications. Current requirements for Solar Inverters focus on high voltage, high efficiency for energy saving, and long lifetime. For the resistor, this means high reliability with long lifetime, high voltage-withstand capability and high accuracy. Panasonic has a variety of resistor families that can be employed in solar inverter applications.
• Graphite Thermal Interface Material (now available) is a compressible type of graphite sheet that is used as thermal interface material, which has very high compressibility compared to standard pyrolytic graphite sheets (PGS). Its outstanding heat resistance and reliability help to achieve longer service life and higher performance of various components. It is particularly suited to inverters and converters, car-mounted cameras, motor control units and automotive LEDs.
• Power Relays are easy to use electromechanical relays with switching capacities from 2A up to 120A for mounting directly on a PCB. When it comes to next generation switching solutions, Panasonic wide range of relays is essential in applications such as wall boxes and chargers for electric vehicles, inverters for solar power plants or as safety components for battery management units in hybrid and electric vehicles.
• Panasonic's SVPC Series of OS-CON™ Aluminum-Polymer Solid Capacitors come in both Surface Mount and Through-Hole variants. These capacitors are versatile, covering a voltage range from 2.5 VDC to 16 VDC, with capacitance values spanning from 39 µF to 2700 µF. They exhibit a low equivalent series resistance (ESR) range from 9 mΩ to 35 mΩ. OS-CON capacitors play a major role in the optimisation of solar inverters. To efficiently generate energy from the sun, the solar panel must absorb energy from the sun continuously as the earth rotates. By detecting and tracking the live position of the sun and adjusting the angles of the panel to ensure that it always faces the sun the solar energy harvest can be maximised. Due to its long lifespan and minimal ESR changes even in low temperatures, OS-CON is ideal for outdoor and surveillance camera applications.
• Wireless PAN9026: The PAN9026 is a 2.4/5 GHz ISM band Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio module, which includes a wireless radio for easy integration of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity into various electronic devices. This module is designed for surface mounting (SMT) and occupies a compact space with dimensions of 17.5 mm x 10.0 mm x 2.6 mm. The module's interfaces include SDIO 1-bit or 4-bit, and it can operate over a wide temperature range, from -30 to +85 °C. The PAN902x Series perfectly connects the charging station with mobile devices or a cloud.
