CarTIEP

Year: 2026
Project leader: Pierre Lefranc
Laboratory: G2ELab

 

Scientific and/or technological context, project objectives, and positioning relative to the state of the art

The G2ELAB Power Electronics team has begun exploring ways to promote the design and production of power electronics while taking into account the environment in which the industry operates. This work is therefore aimed at increasing the sustainability of the systems produced. Can this greater sustainability be achieved by promoting disassembly? By reusing some of the components? Without understanding the industrial ecosystem—and, more broadly, the regional context—in which a company operates, these questions remain purely theoretical. For example, considering ways to encourage the disassembly of certain components over others without any idea of which stakeholders might adopt such practices can lead to the development of fruitless initiatives—technically interesting, but disconnected from the realities on the ground.

 

Scientific program, methodology, and expected results, as well as their potential impact

Our long-term goal is to explore changes that can be introduced into the design of power electronics components, with the aim of both enhancing their environmental sustainability and strengthening the resilience of the industry by making it more self-sufficient at the regional level and thus less vulnerable to the many global upheavals, particularly geopolitical and economic ones. Since the scenario of a world marked by multiple conflicts (economic, financial, military, and cultural) is unfortunately more plausible than it was a few years ago, it is important to reconcile the issue of the environmental sustainability of what we produce with the resilience of an industry at the European level, or even on a smaller scale, such as the Grenoble region. Before launching a thesis in one or two years on the feasibility of a more regionally focused design of power electronics devices, based on a better understanding of the potential of the Grenoble regional ecosystem, a preliminary study should be conducted to identify the power electronics devices for which such an approach would be relevant. Offering a master’s-level internship on the topic of electronic engineering would therefore aim to survey what is produced locally in power electronics, identify the stakeholders involved in these productions, determine whether they are local, European, global, and to identify the most influential players—those capable of driving change or, conversely, of hindering it—in order to map the Grenoble power electronics ecosystem and its interactions at the local level as well as at other geographic scales.

Project Organization 

The goal of this project is to establish a collaboration between the G2Elab power electronics team and Nicolas Buclet of the PACTE laboratory. The use of a sociological approach within the context of a regional strategy for power electronics is entirely new. The strategy is therefore to jointly supervise a master’s-level internship (M1 or M2) in order to launch this collaboration and obtain initial field results.