How Good are the Design Tools in Power Electronics?

Abstract

A 100 kW, isolated dc–dc converter was built over the course of one year, starting from a blank page. This paper details the design and manufacturing process. It is found that while a satisfying converter was built, large parts of the electrical design relied on coarse models, because of the lack of accurate models, and of the system complexity. For the transformer design, 3D Finite Element simulation was found to require a large effort, but its very good accuracy made it a valuable tool. Regarding converter control, rapid prototyping and power hardware-in-the-loop were found to be highly efficient tools.

Thomas Lagier, Piotr Dworakowski, Laurent Chedot, François Wallart, Bruno Lefebvre, Jose Maneiro, Juan Paez, Philippe Ladoux, Cyril Buttay

Presented at EPE’20 ECCE Europe