Interleaved active clump forward converter with novel integrated magnetic components

Abstract

This paper proposes Series Input Parallel Output (SIPO) interleaved Active Clump Forward (ACF) converter with novel integrated magnetic components that may achieve high power density. The proposed converter consists of two ACF converters in SIPO connection to share the input voltage and output current. The natural magnetizing reset can be realized by the active clump circuit. The SIPO connection distributes the voltage stress of the primary side switches and the thermal stress of the output rectifiers and filters. The interleaved PWM operation also diminishes the current ripple in the output capacitor to reduce the size the output filter. In addition, the integrated magnetic components are used for inductors and transformers in the proposed converter to realize size-reduction of the magnetic components. Therefore, this converter is suitable for high input voltage and high output current applications such as dc-dc converters EVs and HEVs. In this paper, the operation principle and the theoretical analysis for the proposed integrated magnetic components are presented. Following we use core models for the integrated magnetic components, and the superiority of them in term of reducing the size and losses in the magnetic components is demonstrated clearly through comparison with a conventional single ACF converter and an conventional SIPO interleaved ACF converter. As a result, it is cleared that the proposed converter is effective for size-reduction and low-losses of the magnetic components under the same conditions. To verify the theoretical results, the experiments using a 500 W output prototype are conducted.