Continuously Operating, Air Cooled, Ground Circuit Enabled by Advanced Magnetics with Tuned Thermal Profiles

Hepburn and Sons has teamed with the University of Pittsburgh to develop a novel air-cooled grounding circuit for medium voltage AC Shipboard Power Systems (SPS) that leverages the latest advances in magnetic materials to handle continuous fault current and DC current support with SWAP-C savings achieved through spatially tunable inductors reducing heat generation and coordinating hot spot localization. The team will evaluate passive and active solutions to best address the US Navy’s needs. Reliable SPS must operate continuously despite the existence of a single line to ground fault. This necessities a high resistance between the neutral and ground to regulate the neutral voltage to a safe and manageable level. However, continuous operation is a challenge with the resulting high-power dissipation. Novel grounding circuits can mitigate heat generation through reactance based current limiting. Further, magnetic solutions can better manage heat generation with spatial tuning of material properties to customize thermal profiles. This results in significant loss reduction in the grounding circuit which enables continuous operation with air cooling.