Power Converters with Best In-Class Power Density

The demand for electrical energy increases at a steady pace worldwide due to the growing and emerging applications such as server/telecom farms, 5G base station, more-electric aircrafts, consumer electronics, robotics, and electric vehicles.

The volume and efficiency of the power converters utilized in these systems play a critical role for the fulfillment of this growth.

Higher efficiency translates into more capacity utilization and less cooling efforts, whereas low volume and weight usually reduces the cost of the electronic components.

Both of these aspects heavily depend on the innovations on the power topologies, control algorithms, magnetics, thermal substrates, and particularly power semiconductor switches.

The power converter topologies in the literature have been invented to overcome or mitigate the large reverse recovery and output charge of Si power devices, while magnetics are optimized for switching frequencies that are achievable with Si power devices.

However, the maximum efficiency and power density of Si based converters have already reached to its theoretical limit through innovations on the control and converter topologies.

Recently, the adoption of the wide band-gap semiconductors has escalated the expectations from power electronics significantly, and initiated the transformation of the power architecture through new topologies and control innovations, while bringing new challenges in the high frequency domain.This research proposal is intended to innovate, design, and implement a new front-end PFC converter switched at >400 kHz to achieve best in-class efficiency and power density with targets of more than 98.5% peak efficiency and 85W/in3 enclosed power density at 3.7kW output power.

The know-how and framework will then be engineered to meet certain industrial specs of various applications including the pre-regulator stage of server/telecom supplies, on-board chargers, industrial drives.