Design and Experimental Validation of A Novel Integrated Three-Phase Inductor

Miniaturization of the electromagnetics plays a critical role in all power converter design since they dominate the size and weight of the overall package. This paper proposes a super-compact three-phase inductor design using integrated technique, contributing to higher power density of the Vienna power factor correction (PFC) rectifier. A novel symmetrical magnetic mechanism is introduced and the equivalent magnetic circuit is modeled to evaluate the corresponding inductance network. A variety of the magnetic materials has been studied comprehensively to investigate the most suitable material in this research. Moreover, a close-loop iterative framework is formulated by coupling the analytical expression and 3D FEM-based numerical model to address the relevant parameters of the investigated inductor design. Furthermore, a prototype incorporating the proposed configuration is fabricated and extensive experiments are being performed in a 6kW/29kHz Vienna PFC circuit to validate the design. Obtained results are quite comparable with FEM simulations and in-circuit inductance deduction. With the support of the experimental results, the effectiveness of the proposed design has been validated with 45% size reduction compared to the conventional counterparts without compromising any thermal performance or filtering capability.