Conventional smart switches and smart home solutions use relays to connect or remove a load from the supply. However, relays have many disadvantages like high resistance, switching loss (Loss caused by the moving of the contactor), heat and other losses. This is why power electronic switches were developed.
Since transistors have low switching speeds and can usually not withstand high currents and voltages required of a conventional switch, in this project, I made a power electronic smart switch using an IGBT.
These switches like transistors, IGBTs and MOSFETs are solid state switches, which means that they have no moving parts. So, they have no switching losses. Also, they have very little resistances and can be easily controlled by giving pulses or PWM signals.
This is the link for the Instructable’s tutorial.
Soham Chatterjee 