DC-DC Converter Design for Power Distribution Systems

in Electric Vehicles using Calorimetric Loss Measurements

Sven Bolte, Norbert Frhleke, Joachim Bcker

Paderborn University
Power Electronics and Electrical Drives
Warburger Str. 100
D-33095 Paderborn, Germany
E-Mail: {bolte, froehleke, boecker}@lea.upb.de
URL: http://ei.uni-paderborn.de/lea/

Acknowledgements
This research and development project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and
Research (BMBF) within the Leading-Edge Cluster Intelligent Technical Systems
OstWestfalenLippe (its OWL) and managed by the Project Management Agency Karlsruhe (PTKA).
The authors are responsible for the contents of this publication.

Keywords
Power converters for EV, Transformer , Resonant converter, Silicon Carbide (SiC),
Switching losses

Abstract
In this contribution, a uni-directional converter is proposed which supplies the EVs safety-low
voltage grid of 14 V DC directly from the drive battery voltage level of Vbatt = 250 370 V. The
converter consists of two power stages which are a hard-switching SiC boost converter and a soft-
switching resonant converter. Special attention is paid to the accurate loss modelling of the converter,
where frequency-depending winding losses, magnetic core losses, and semiconductor switching losses
are considered. The core and winding losses were validated by calorimetric measurements, which
results are in good accordance with the simulations. As final result, a converter peak efficiency of
98.2% was achieved.

Introduction
Traction batteries with a maximum voltage of about 400 V are typically used as energy storage in
electric vehicles (EV). Some appliances of the EV can be adapted to this voltage. This leads to smaller
cable cross sections due to the decreased current compared to the traditional safety-low voltage level
of 14 V. However, there is still a demand for a 14 V grid for numerous appliances like lighting,
electronic control units (ECU) and smaller electrical drives [1].

S1 Cr1 S3 S5
iout
T
+
C2 Vout
iin +
Lr
C1 VDC
Lb
S6
Vin
S2 Cr2 S4

Fig. 1: Schematic of the DC-DC converter with two power stages

If lithium-ion batteries are used as energy storage, the battery voltage changes in relation to the state of
charge. This leads to a wide input voltage range, for example Vin = 250 370 V.
In this paper, an isolated DC-DC converter of 500 W (see Fig. 1) for an on-board electrical system is
examined regarding the distribution of power losses and the attainable efficiency.

Converter Concept
In order to obtain high conversion efficiencies, resonant converters are widely used in isolated DC-DC
converters. Generally, the voltage ratio of resonant converters can be adapted with variable switching-
frequency control, which is seen as a drawback in case of wide input or output voltage ranges [2]. An
alternative is to run the resonant converter with constant voltage ratio and to perform the voltage
adaption with the help of another non-isolated DC-DC converter stage. A series-resonant converter
operated at fixed frequency and fixed duty cycle of 50% is suitable for this task. With a switching
frequency slightly above the resonance frequency, it achieves zero-voltage switching (ZVS) at turn-on
for switches S3, S4 (see Fig. 1) for a large power range [3]. Consequently, the proposed converter
consists of two power stages: A hard-switching boost converter for output voltage regulation and a
series-resonant converter of constant voltage ratio with galvanic isolation. Compared to the switching-
frequency control of a resonant converter, the boost converter can be easily controlled.
If the boost converter is operated in continuous conduction mode (CCM) with low current ripple, it
adds only little harmonics to the load current of the battery. Silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs facilitate
hard-switching with low switching losses [4], consequently they are used for the switches S1, S2 in the
boost converter.
Since the DC-link voltage has to be higher than the maximum input voltage Vin,max = 370 V, it is
assigned to Vdc = 400 V. Due to the required high transformer conversion ratio of n1/n2 = 14, generally
only a poor coupling factor between primary and secondary winding can be achieved, resulting in a
large leakage inductance. The idea is even to benefit from this leakage inductance as series inductance
of the resonant tank of the converter. Therefore, no additional resonant inductor Lr is needed, resulting
in reduced cost and increased power density of the converter. Since the leakage inductance is mainly
determined by the flux paths through air, its value does not change by saturation of the core material.
Hence, the resonance frequency stays stable also at higher loads.
As the output current is relatively high, a center-tapped secondary winding with two MOSFETs as
synchronous rectifiers (S5, S6) is preferred against a single secondary winding with full-bridge
rectification as the first solution facilitates lower conduction losses.

Loss Modeling
The switching losses of the transistors depend on many properties like voltage, current, temperature,
and commutation inductance. As not all operation points are covered in the datasheet, the switching
losses of switches S1, S2 were measured with the double-pulse test for relevant operation points [5]
(see Fig. 2).
40 40
35 35
30 30 VT / V
25 25 100
Eoff / J
Eon / J

200
20 20
300
15 15
400
10 10
5 5
0 0
0 2 4 6 8 0 2 4 6 8
IT / A IT / A
Fig. 2: Interpolated switching losses of the MOSFETs for relevant voltages and currents
To compute the switching losses it is necessary to determine the voltage and the current of the
semiconductors for every switching event which is done with a numerical calculation script. It turned
out that the measurement data can be fitted with reasonable residual errors by a 2-dimensional
polynomial of the following form:
Esw (VT , I T ) (a2VT2  a1VT  a0 )(b2 I T2  b1I T  b0 ) (1)

In continuous conduction mode, the RMS current through the boost inductor Lb and the half bridge
composed by S1, S2 can be computed from the average input current iin and the current ripple 'iin :
'iin2 (2)
I in iin2 
12

The conduction losses of diode and transistors are derived from the RMS and mean current values

Pcd,D Vf i  rd I 2 , Pcd,T RDSon I 2 (3)

with the threshold voltage Vf and the differential resistance rd of diodes and the on-resistance RDSon of
the MOSFETs as parameter (see Tab. I.).
Table I: On-resistance and threshold voltage of semiconductors
Buck converter SiC MOSFET S1, S2 RDSonb = 65 m
Resonant converter Si MOSFET S3, S4 RDSonr = 18 m
Synchronous Si MOSFET S5, S6 RDSonsr = 0.5 m
Threshold voltage body diode synchronous MOSFET S5, S6 Vfsr = 0.9 V

The very low loss angle of the magnetic components makes high demands on the resolution of the
measurement equipment. Hence, a small offset or phase error would result in huge errors of the
derived power loss. Consequently, a calorimetric measurement method is applied to determine the
power losses in the boost inductor Lb and transformer T [6].
The calorimeter consists of a heat-isolated box (see Fig. 3 a)) with a relatively large thermal resistance
Rth. For calibration, a heating resistor Rh is fed by a DC current Ih in order to generate a well-defined
heat flow Pth and to measure the resulting temperature difference T = Ti Ta, where Ta is the ambient
temperature and Ti the temperature inside the box:

'T f ( Pth ) (4)

Vice versa, the determined relation can then be used in order to identify the losses of a specimen based
on a temperature measurement (see Fig. 3 b)).
a) b)
Rth 6

idut Lb Ti Ta 5

vdut 4
Pth / W

3
Ih
2
Vh Rh
1
0
0 5 10 15
T / C
Fig. 3: a) Setup for calorimetric measurement b) Heat flow Pth versus temperature difference T
An inductor with an inductance of Lb = 100 H was built with an ETD 29/16/10 core of ferrite
material N87 and the losses were measured at three different operation points (two values for
frequency and peak-to-peak flux density) to extract the Steinmetz parameters with DC bias (see Eq.
(6)):
= 1.24, = 2.59, ki = 1.29 W/(HzTm)

Since the calorimeter captures the complete power dissipation of the inductor Pth = PFe + PCu, the core
loss PFe of the inductor has still to be separated from the copper loss PCu. Therefore, the frequency-
depending resistance RCu,meas(f) of the winding was measured with a LCR analyzer and fitted by the
function RCu,fit(f) (cf. Fig. 4). Then, the copper losses were computed with the amplitude spectrum of
the current idut:
f 2
idut ( f )
PCu

0
2
RCu ( f ) df


(5)

0.5
RCu,meas
0.4 RCu,fit

0.3
RCu /

0.2 87 m

0.1

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
f / kHz
Fig. 4: Ohmic resistance RCu of inductor Lb winding versus frequency

To estimate the inductor losses in circuit simulation, the waveform of the flux density can be separated
to triangular-shaped intervals. These intervals represent minor loops in the magnetization curve of the
core material. The core loss PFe is then calculated utilizing the improved generalized Steinmetz
equation [7],

D
1 Ts dB
PVFe ki 'B E D dt (6)
Ts 0 dt

where PVFe is the power density, which still has to be multiplied with the volume VFe of the core and
B is the peak-to-peak flux density. The copper losses are again calculated with eq. (5).
A core of type ETD 44/22/15 of ferrite material N87 was selected to assemble the power transformer.
It should be noted that this core is overdimensioned with respect to the power rating of the converter.
However, the space in the winding window is needed to include the necessary amount of litz wire.
With a maximum flux density of BTmax = 25 mT, the core losses are almost negligible.
For optimal dimensioning of the resonant converter, especially the ratio between the characteristic
impedance of the resonant tank and the load resistance, it can even be necessary to enlarge the leakage
inductance. This can be reached by installing the secondary winding with some distance to the
secondary winding (see Fig. 5).
 ls secondary winding n2
primary winding n1

spacer

ferrite core

Fig. 5: Lateral cut through transformer T with spacer between primary and secondary winding

Hence, a spacer of isolating material of width ls = 3 mm is inserted between the windings which leads
to the resonance inductance of about Lr = 96 H. The losses of the transformer T are calculated in the
same way as of the inductor Lb. Due to the sinusoidal current without DC bias in the resonant
converter, the core losses PRFe can be derived directly from the ferrite material datasheet. The
properties of the magnetic components are summarized in Tab. II.

Table II: Properties of magnetic components

Number of turns boost inductor Lb nb = 47
Length of air gap boost inductor Lb ll = 2 mm
Number of primary winding turns of transformer T n1 = 50
Number of secondary winding turns* of transformer T n2 = 23.5
Length of air gap transformer T none
*center tap after 3.5 turns

Simulation and Measurement Results

The described method was used to determine the power losses in the two-stage DC-DC converter. All
calculations were conducted using a Matlab script. The switching frequency of the boost converter is
fsb = 95 kHz while the switching frequency of the resonant converter is fsr = 200 kHz. To compare the
impact of different operation points, the simulation was applied for the lowest (Vin = 250 V) and for
the highest input voltage (Vin = 370 V) at half (Pout = 250 W) and full load (Pout = 500 W).

a) b)
5
16 Vin = 250 V Vin = 370 V Pout = 250 W Pout = 500 W

PBsw 4
12
PBcd
3 Pcal
PBCu
P/W
P/W

8 PRCu
PBFe
2
PRcd PRFe
4 PRCu 1
PRFe
0 0
Pout = 250 W 500 W 250 W 500 W sim. meas. sim. meas.
Fig. 6: a) Distribution of losses b) Comparison of simulated and measured losses in transformer T

The distribution of power losses in all four operation points is depicted in Fig. 6 a). At the lowest input
voltage Vin = 250 V, the input current Iin reaches its maximum value. Therefore, also the switching
losses PBsw, the conduction losses PBcd in the boost converter and the copper losses PBCu in the inductor
Lb are larger than as for the high input voltage.
Due to the reduced current ripple at an input voltage Vin = 370 V, where the duty cycle of the boost
converter is below 10 %, the core losses PBFe are almost negligible. Since the resonant converter is
operating with constant DC-link and output voltage, the conduction losses of the semiconductors PRcd
just depend on the output power. Fig. 6 b) offers a closer look on the copper losses PRCu and core
losses PRFe in the transformer T. As a result of the low flux density, the core losses are dominated by
the copper losses by far.
The resonant converter was built up as experimental setup and the transformer T was mounted into the
calorimetric box in order to measure the losses Pcal at Pout = 250 W and Pout = 500 W.
Table III: Calorimetric measurement of transformer losses
Pout / W T / C Pcal / W ( PRFe + PRCu ) / W
250 3.7 1.2 1.32
500 13.0 4.4 4.39

The comparison of the simulated and measured transformer losses show fairly good accordance (s.
Tab. III) and recommend the calorimetric measurement as a promising method for components with
low loss angle.

Pout = 500 W
Vin = 370 V
= 98.2 %
99
98
/%

97
96
95
500
400 400
300 350
200 300
Pout / W 100 250 Vin / V

Fig. 7: Efficiency versus output power Pout and input voltage Vin

Finally, in Fig. 7 the efficiency is plotted for the complete input voltage range and the output power
in the interval Pout = 100 500 W. A maximum efficiency of about = 98.2 % is reached at full
power and input voltage. For input voltages Vin below 275 V, the efficiency drops under 96 % at light
load. Depending on the battery management strategy of the electric vehicle, these operation points are
possibly reached rarely.

Conclusion
In this contribution it was demonstrated that a two-stage isolated DC-DC converter for power
conversion between the EVs drive battery and the 14 V grid represents a promising candidate
compared to existing concepts, which achieves a peak efficiency of 98.2%. Moreover, simulation
results even show efficiencies of above 96 % for a huge operation range of the converter. The
simulated transformer losses were consistently verified with calorimetric measurements. In general,
this method is recommended to measure the power losses of components with low loss angle.
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