An investigation on 3D printing technology for power electronic converters

Due to the advantages like design flexibility, potential for low costs, short lead time, and so on, three-dimensional (3D) printing technology is currently applied to many fields of engineering and sciences. In order to improve 3D printing technology applying into power electric converter, several prototypes of power electronic components made by using 3D printing are investigated in this paper. The circuit board, the inductor and the heat sink of the buck converter is built by using 3D printing technology. Meanwhile, they are compared with a prototype fabricated by using a milling machine and commercial products. The general 3D printing approaches for building the board, the inductor and the auxiliary components are introduced, respectively. The prototype of the buck converter with 3D printing technology proves that this technology has broad prospects in power electronics once the current material limitations are overcome.