A practical technique to measure transformer losses in high frequency SMPS

Abstract

All electronic gadgets today employ high frequency Switch Mode Power Supplies. As the number of such gadgets is increasing rapidly, the focus is on improving the efficiency of power conversion and better utilization of energy. It is always a challenge for the practicing power supply engineers to exactly apportion and evaluate the total losses in the power converters. While it is relatively easy to compute and measure the power losses in semiconductor devices, it is practically difficult to measure the power losses in magnetic components. The data sheets provided by the manufacturers, for core loss and thermal resistance, do act as a starting point in the design stage but, always the designers felt the need to know the exact power loss in the ferrite high frequency transformers and their thermal resistance values. The data sheets provide thermal resistance values only for the cores and it is necessary to quantify value for a fully wound transformers. Copper losses in high frequency transformers are very significant and too involved to compute. In this paper, we propose a simple and practical technique, which precisely depicts the actual power loss in a high frequency ferrite core transformer. With this technique various ferrite cores can be characterized for their hysteresis losses at varying flux densities and frequencies. We can also precisely compute the thermal resistance of the Ferrite transformers.