Christoph Haederli - Les thèses en ligne de l'INP - Institut National ...

Acknowledgements
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank ABB and INPT for the opportunity to work on the presented topic and
write this thesis. It has been a great experience, allowing me to grow both professionally and
personally.
I would like to thank all my colleagues at ABB and INP Toulouse for the support, countless
fruitful discussions, guidance, fun, in short: the great time we had together during the work on this
thesis. There are too many people to mention all, but I can’t help naming a few:
First, I thank my two advisors Philippe Ladoux and Thierry Meynard at INP Toulouse. I
appreciated their guidance and technical advice very much. Our technical discussions always
opened up new perspectives and brought me a step forward in my work. I would like to thank them
for friendship and for their patience with my French skills… I hope I could improve a little bit
through our long discussions over time. I would also like to thank Guillaume Gateau and Anne-
Marie Lienhardt from INPT for their support on the SMC hardware and control implementation.
Thanks to all other people I had the chance to get to know at INPT too. I always truly enjoyed
spending some time at the lab in Toulouse.
At ABB, my former superior Luc Meysenc is the first to mention. Without his support, I
would not even have started work on a doctoral thesis. His successors Peter Barbosa and Antonio
Coccia kept up the great support and did all they could to make work on the thesis besides regular
project work possible. Silverio Alvarez, also a doctoral student from Philippe Ladoux, was my first
office mate. We had a really good tim e and lots of fruitful conversations on the topic of AC
choppers (which didn’t finally make it into my thesis). His good humor was catching and
motivating and always allowed for a good start into the working day. Toufann Chaudhuri is my
second office mate, working on ML converters too. This proved to be a very good setup as our
common technical interest triggered many ideas and we had countless interesting discussion. I also
would like to thank Toufann for his contribution on the control implementation for the ANPC
prototype. Leonardo Serpa, a former ETH Zürich PhD student (we could then convince to
become a colleague at ABB Corporate Research), has been working on the same topology as I have.
The opportunity to work with the same type of prototype was a great help and Leonardos support
very valuable. Maryam Saeedifard, a former PhD student at Toronto University has spent some
time with us at ABB Corporate Research. I would like to thank her for the support in the lab,
setting up the control hardware, working on the actual control implementation, and running tests.
At last, I would like to thank all my colleagues at ABB Corporate Research for creating such an
enjoyable working environment.
I dedicate this thesis to my family. Without the grant of some extra time, this would not have
been possible. But I also thank Esther and our kids for reminding me that there are other, more
important things besides writing a thesis… I started the thesis four years ago, just about when our
first child was born. To accompany and guide a child in his first steps in this world is one of the
greatest things to experience. And one of the most amazing things too: Our daughter can now
walk, talk, sing, paint, argue, dance, and even ride a bycicle — whereas I have merely written this
thesis.