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This article presents the design, the fabrication, and the test of an isolated DC-DC converter for renewable energy applications. The converter is based on the Dual Active Bridge topology and uses silicon carbide power semiconductors and a medium frequency transformer. The design process covers hardware ranging from the semiconductor die to the complete power converter. For the control, a rapid prototyping approach was used. The experimental validation of the 100 kW prototype is presented.

While several DC-DC converters for HVDC have been proposed in literature, comparison studies are needed to identify the best circuit for a particular case of application. This paper proposes an analytical methodology that allows to assess rapidly the comparison of DC-DC converters. It was applied to evaluate two modular DC-DC structures, one isolated circuit and one non isolated circuit, focusing in the variation of the operating frequency for different DC voltage transformation ratios. The results show that the non-isolated structure presents better indicators compared to the isolated circuit for all the considered cases.

The magnetizing inductance of the medium frequency transformer (MFT) impacts the performance of the isolated dc-dc power converters. The ferrite material is considered for high power transformers but it requires an assembly of type “I” cores resulting in a multi air gap structure of the magnetic core. The authors claim that the multiple air gaps are randomly distributed and that the average air gap length is unpredictable at the industrial design stage. As a consequence, the required effective magnetic permeability and the magnetizing inductance are difficult to achieve within reasonable error margins. This article presents the measurements of the equivalent B(H) and the equivalent magnetic permeability of two three-phase MFT prototypes. The measured equivalent B(H) is used in an FEM simulation and compared against a no load test of a 100 kW isolated dc-dc converter showing a good fit within a 10% error. Further analysis leads to the demonstration that the equivalent magnetic permeability and the average air gap length are nonlinear functions of the number of air gaps. The proposed exponential scaling function enables rapid estimation of the magnetizing inductance based on the ferrite material datasheet only.