A Systematic Design Method and Verification of a Zero Current Ripple Interface for PV-to-Battery Applications

Abstract

A systematic method of designing a zero terminal current ripple integrated magneticĆuk converter for Photovoltaic (PV)-to-Battery applications is presented in this paper. The four winding coupled inductor design consists of two inductors and a two-winding transformer coupled on a common EE-core. The core design uses a simplified flux-reluctance model to arrive at the Area Product formulation for this kind of four winding structure. The zero-ripple condition in the terminal currents is achieved by controlling the coupling coefficients by means of air-gap reluctances in the core. Unlike the earlier designs for this converter, it provides a completely analytical approach to design this converter for a range of duty ratio. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed using finite element analyses (both 2-D and 3-D), thermal validation and circuit simulations in PSpice. The zero-ripple condition is verified experimentally.