Bi-Directional Power Converters

SatCon will provide a galvanically isolated, high power density bi-directional resonant power conversion topology for the key isolated DC/DC link in developing a truly bi-directional and universal DC/AC, DC/DC and AC/DC power conversion block. This key link will be used between standard power electronics building blocks (PEBB) modules that have been designed, built, and thoroughly tested for IPS shipboard use. The PEBB modules are inherently bi-directional as DC/AC or AC/DC converters and a control variant on the standard hardware architecture will run the PEBB modules as triple interleaved boost in, buck out converters. Preliminary simulations of the selected topology have shown successful performance with all modules. It is nominally designed for ‘0 to 700V’ DC or ‘0 to 480V’ AC in to ‘0 to 700V’ DC or ‘0 to 480V’ AC out in each direction. The bi-directional resonant converter is an incremental variant on the 300kW peak, 80kHz resonant converter developed for the Army Research Laboratory for pulse power applications and incurs no switching losses in the power semi-conductor switches. It will use high frequency conversion (approx 100kHz and nanocrystaline core material for small size. The bi-directional DC/DC boost/buck three channel interleaved adaptation of a PEBB module is based on an eight channel 300kW peak battery to bus converter developed also for the Army Research Laboratory and incurs no turn on switch losses for high efficiency. High frequency and Nanocrystaline cored inductors will be used for small size.