Design and Optimization of Energy Storage Inductor for High Power High-Frequency DC-DC Converter

The size of Wide Band Gap (WBG) power electronics based converter is often determined by the inductive component. Therefore, high power density inductor design is required to reduce overall weight and volume of converters. In this paper, the novel nanocrystalline powder core is proposed and designed for a SiC MOSFET based DC/DC boost converter. Finite Element (FE) models of the nanocrystalline powder core inductor and a ferrite core inductor are built to examine the loss and inductance under high-frequency operation. The results show that with the same inductance, the volume of nanocrystalline powder core is smaller than the ferrite core with lower loss.