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New compound magnetic material based on parallel continuous ferromagnetic microwires (e.g., based on cobalt) embedded in a body made of polymeric material can potentially offer significant mechanical advantages over well-known fragile ferrite in some applications where the magnetic material has to withstand mechanical vibrations. The diameter of the magnetic microwires is minimal (3–60  $\mu$ m) compared to the rest of the dimensions (80–300 mm) and the number of microwires is in the order of 1000 s. It requires extremely fine meshes, then brute force simulation by the finite element method is not possible. In this article, a method to overcome this limitation is proposed, which is based on the substitution of the original material by a homogenous material that behaves, in a macroscopic sense, as the compound material. The physical properties of the homogeneous material are obtained in different spatial directions, due to the inherent anisotropy of the compounded magnetic component, through analytical equations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a 6.78-MHz wireless power transfer (WPT) system, which is configured to automatically cancel the reactance in primary and secondary. In the WPT system, the detuning caused by the parameter variation, the implementation of the frequency control, and components tolerance will decrease a lot the system performance, especially in very low coupling (k = 0.06) and low power applications. The delivered power is sensitive to the reactance under low coupling and high-frequency conditions, accordingly, a novel self-adaptive WPT system to automatically retune the resonance is proposed. The proposed concept uses a synchronous series compensator (SSC) instead of a capacitor in series with the secondary to tune it, which can automatically cancel the reactance caused by the inductor, nonresistive load or frequency variation, hence increases the system performance in terms of delivered power and efficiency. A prototype has been built and tested experimentally to validate the feasibility of the proposed concept. A constant power of 1.8 W can be transmitted with 50% overall efficiency at a coil separation distance of 1.5 cm between the printed-circuit-board transmitter (3 × 3 cm2) and receiver (1 × 2 cm2) under wide detuning conditions, being 0.95 the ratio between distance and the equivalent diameter of receiver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies design guidelines to optimize the inductive coils for electric vehicles by replacing the standard compact ferrite core with a compound of polymers, nanoparticles, and tile-links of ferrite and by reviewing different aspects of the winding to improve mechanical behavior and efficiency. A system composed of the studied vehicle assembly and ground assembly from the society of automotive engineers’ recommended practice is defined. Fast three-dimensional (3-D) finite element simulations are performed by evaluating different geometric aspects of the vehicle assembly. In doing so, the variation of coupling factor and inductance related to the geometry can be observed and compared in order to analyze the performance when the amount of compact ferrite is reduced. The polymer bonded magnetic is, then, incorporated to improve the decreased magnetic behavior due to the reduction in ferrite. In previous works, the modeling of the litz-wire and polymer bonded magnetic were developed to accelerate the simulations. In this article, we include the modeling of the compact ferrite tile-links to further reduce the time consumption of these simulations. Moreover, simple two-dimensional simulations are described to study the windings’ parasitic capacitances. The design guidelines, based on fast 3-D simulations, are detailed and validated with particular prototypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main standard for avionic equipment DO-160G defines a set of tests that require compliance before the employment of a device in aircraft. An important test involves the generator voltage and consequential current distortion of the three-phase load in the variable 360–800 Hz frequency grid. The main purpose of this paper is to present and analyze a systematic design methodology for three-phase boost and buck rectifiers in order to meet with the voltage distortion test requirement. For a given voltage harmonic profile, the current harmonic limits that have to be satisfied are translated into equivalent per-harmonic admittances and a profile of maximum rectifier input admittance versus frequency is obtained. The defined profile, due to normalization, is applicable to arbitrary power level with simple shifting by the base admittance governed by the converter nominal power. It is shown that for boost-type rectifiers there is a tradeoff between current controller bandwidth and input inductor size, while for the buck-type rectifiers main limitation lies in the input LC filter design used for differential electromagnetic interference filtering. The experimental results conducted on an SiC three-phase 10 kW VIENNA rectifier are tightly backing up the proposed theoretical analysis. This paper is accompanied by three videos demonstrating experimental measurement of d-axis open-loop duty cycle to inductor current transfer function, loop-gain of d-axis current controller with 3.8 kHz bandwidth and variable grid frequency 360–800 Hz operation of the converter under 0% and 10% input three-phase voltage total harmonic distortion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a single-stage converter for a high-bandwidth and high-efficiency envelope amplifier. In the proposed application, due to the high peak-to-average-power ratio, high bandwidth, and the power level requirements, the envelope amplifier has low efficiency. Therefore, many efforts have been made to increase the efficiency of the envelope amplifier. To achieve this improvement, the current ripple cancellation technique is applied in this paper to a synchronous buck converter to cancel the output current ripple and to decrease the switching frequency without a reduction in the large signal bandwidth, for open-loop operation and for the envelope elimination and restoration technique. The advantages of the proposed design are presented and validated experimentally. The transfer function of the output filter of the buck converter with a ripple cancellation circuit has been modeled and compared to measurements, showing a good correspondence. Experimental validation is provided at 4 MHz of switching frequency, for dc and for variable output voltage, applying a sinusoidal reference and a 64-QAM signal. Experimental validation of the efficiency improvement is provided, compared to the equivalent design of the conventional buck converter in terms of the output voltage ripple rejection ratio and large signal bandwidth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a theoretical analysis and an optimization method for envelope amplifiers. Highly efficient envelope amplifiers based on a switching converter in parallel or in series with a linear regulator are analyzed and optimized. The results of the optimization process are shown, and these two architectures are compared regarding their complexity and efficiency. The proposed optimization method is based on the knowledge of the transmitted signal type (OFDM, WCDMA…), and it can be applied to any signal type as long as the envelope probability distribution is known. Finally, it is shown that both analyzed architectures have an inherent efficiency limit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, analysis and design of a 3.3-kW isolated single-stage three-phase buck-type rectifier for aircraft applications is presented. The operating principle and modulation method of the proposed rectifier are introduced. The advantageous zero-voltage switching (ZVS) feature in all of the switching transitions is analyzed. A comparison with the VIENNA Rectifier III is done, being different both in the phase-leg implementation and the modulation sequence. A detailed rectifier design guideline is discussed and losses estimations are provided aiming at reaching 93.7% overall efficiency, including the EMI (electromagnetic interference) filter. Simulation waveforms are presented. Finally, experimental results obtained with the designed 3.3-kW hardware demonstrator are provided. The results verify achievement of ZVS in all of the switching transitions from full load down to 50% of nominal load, while exhibiting 1.9% THD $_I$ (total harmonic distortion) and 0.9996 PF (power factor) at nominal power, ultimately showing very good agreement to the simulation results. This article is accompanied by a video demonstrating experimental operation of the proposed rectifier at nominal input voltage, output voltage, and output power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a control linearization technique for a single-phase single-stage inverter with multiple modulation strategies. The power topology is based on an flying capacitor multi-level (FCML) inverter, and the control is based on the plant inversion. The proposed technique allows decoupling the control of the input current and the output voltage, which simplifies the control in two ways: first, the control of both variables is independent and second, the controllers are independent of the modulation applied, thanks to the plant inversion. This control is implemented in an field-programmable gate array. Since the converter operates at variable frequency, two different data acquisition alternatives are explored: sampling at variable frequency (once per switching cycle) or sampling at constant frequency (higher than the switching frequency).The proposed control is validated by simulation and experimental results with a 1-kVA prototype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the fundamental aspects of the principal resonant network topologies for inductive power transfer systems. From the analytical derivation, different features, such as the variation of the coupling factor or load changes, are studied. Based on this study, a resonant series–series topology is selected, which cancels the leakage inductance. Due to the specifications, the air gap distance and its tolerance ($\pm \text{12}\%$) produce a wide variation of the coupling factor of the inductive link. Therefore, through fast three-dimensional simulations by finite elements, the inductive link is designed so that this variation is minimized. This maintains the resonance and the designed system, in turn, behaves like a voltage source regardless of power, and thus, evades the implementation of a control stage. A dc–dc converter is constructed where the distance between the primary and secondary side vary from 35 to 45 mm, and the power ranges from 0 to 5 kW. The output voltage range goes from 38 to 55 $V_{\text{DC}}$. Experimental results for the dc–dc converter report an efficiency of over 94%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The combination of minimum time control and multiphase converter is a favorable option for dc–dc converters in applications where output voltage variation is required, such as RF amplifiers and dynamic voltage scaling in microprocessors, due to their advantage of fast dynamic response. In this paper, an improved minimum time control approach for multiphase buck converter that is based on charge balance technique, aiming at fast output voltage transition is presented. Compared with the traditional method, the proposed control takes into account the phase delay and current ripple in each phase. Therefore, by investigating the behavior of multiphase converter during voltage transition, it resolves the problem of current unbalance after the transient, which can lead to long settling time of the output voltage. The restriction of this control is that the output voltage that the converter can provide is related to the number of the phases, because only the duty cycles at which the multiphase converter has total ripple cancellation are used in this approach. The model of the proposed control is introduced, and the design constraints of the buck converter's filter for this control are discussed. In order to prove the concept, a four-phase buck converter is implemented and the experimental results that validate the proposed control method are presented. The application of this control to RF envelope tracking is also presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]