Browsing by Author "Cui, Han"
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- Constant-Flux Inductor with Enclosed-Winding Geometry for Improved Energy DensityCui, Han (Virginia Tech, 2013-06-28)The passive components such as inductors and capacitors are bulky parts on circuit boards. Researchers in academia, government, and industry have been searching for ways to improve the magnetic energy density and reduce the package size of magnetic parts. The "constant-flux" concept discussed herein is leveraged to achieve high magnetic-energy density by distributing the magnetic flux uniformly, leading to inductor geometries with a volume significantly lower than that of conventional products. A relatively constant flux distribution is advantageous not only from the density standpoint, but also from the thermal standpoint via the reduction of hot spots, and from the reliability standpoint via the suppression of flux crowding. For toroidal inductors, adding concentric toroidal cells of magnetic material and distributing the windings properly can successfully make the flux density distribution uniform and thus significantly improve the power density. Compared with a conventional toroidal inductor, the constant-flux inductor introduced herein has an enclosed-winding geometry. The winding layout inside the core is configured to distribute the magnetic flux relatively uniformly throughout the magnetic volume to obtain a higher energy density and smaller package volume than those of a conventional toroidal inductor. Techniques to shape the core and to distribute the winding turns to form a desirable field profile is described for one class of magnetic geometries with the winding enclosed by the core. For a given set of input parameters such as the inductor's footprint and thickness, permeability of the magnetic material, maximum permissible magnetic flux density for the allowed core loss, and current rating, the winding geometry can be designed and optimized to achieve the highest time constant, which is the inductance divided by resistance (L/Rdc). The design procedure is delineated for the constant-flux inductor design together with an example with three winding windows, an inductance of 1.6 µH, and a resistance of 7 mΩ. The constant-flux inductor designed has the same inductance, dc resistance, and footprint area as a commercial counterpart, but half the height. The uniformity factor α is defined to reflect the uniformity level inside the core volume. For each given magnetic material and given volume, an optimal uniformity factor exists, which has the highest time constant. The time constant varies with the footprint area, inductor thickness, relative permeability of the magnetic material, and uniformity factor. Therefore, the objective for the constant-flux inductor design is to seek the highest possible time constant, so that the constant-flux inductor gives a higher inductance or lower resistance than commercial products of the same volume. The calculated time-constant-density of the constant-flux inductor designed is 4008 s/m3, which is more than two times larger than the 1463 s/m3 of a commercial product. To validate the concept of constant-flux inductor, various ways of fabrication for the core and the winding were explored in the lab, including the routing process, lasing process on the core, etching technique on copper, and screen printing with silver paste. The most successful results were obtained from the routing process on both the core and the winding. The core from Micrometals has a relative permeability of around 22, and the winding is made of copper sheets 0.5 mm thick. The fabricated inductor prototype shows a significant improvement in energy density: at the same inductance and resistance, the volume of the constant-flux inductor is two times smaller than that of the commercial counterpart. The constant-flux inductor shows great improvement in energy density and the shrinking of the total size of the inductor below that of the commercial products. Reducing the volume of the magnetic component is beneficial to most power. The study of the constant-flux inductor is currently focused on the dc analysis, and the ac analysis is the next step in the research.
- Cooler with emi-limiting inductor(United States Patent and Trademark Office, 2019-05-14)A power device package includes a dielectric substrate having an upper conductor layer and a lower conductor layer, a semiconductor die coupled to the upper conductor layer of the dielectric substrate via conductive adhesive, a cooler including a protruding hillock having a top surface and outer sides, the lower conductor layer of the dielectric substrate being coupled to the surface of the protruding hillock via an adhesive, and a magnetic material attached mateably around the protruding hillock. The magnetic material includes inner sides abutting the outer sides of the protruding hillock.
- Modeling, Implementation, and Simulation of Two-Winding Plate InductorCui, Han (Virginia Tech, 2017-06-30)Design of magnetic component is a key factor in achieving high frequency, high power-density converters. Planar magnetics are widely used in bias power supplies for the benefits of low profile and their compatibility with printed-circuit boards (PCB). The coupled inductors with winding layers sandwiched between two core plates are studied in this dissertation in order to model the self-inductance, winding loss, and core loss. The most challenging task for the plate-core inductor is to model the magnetic field with finite core dimensions, very non-uniform flux pattern, and large fringing flux. The winding is placed near the edge of the core to maximize the energy within the limited footprint and the amount of energy stored outside the core volume is not negligible. The proportional-reluctance, equal-flux (PREF) model is developed to build the contours with equal amount of flux by governing the reluctance of the flux path. The shapes of the flux lines are modeled by different functions that guided by the finite-element simulation (FES). The field from the flux lines enables calculation of inductance, winding loss, and core loss, etc. The inductance matrix including self-inductance and mutual inductance of a coupled inductor is important for circuit simulation and evaluation. The derivation of the inductance matrix of inductors with plate-core structure is described in Chapter 2. Two conditions are defined as common-mode (CM) field and differential-mode (DM) field in order to compute the matrix parameters. The proportional-reluctance, equal-flux (PREF) model introduced is employed to find the CM field distribution, and the DM field distribution is found from functions analogous to that of a solenoid's field. The inductance calculated are verified by flex-circuit prototypes with various dimensions, and the application of the inductance model is presented at the last with normalized parameters to cover structures within a wide-range. In circuit where coupled inductors are used instead of transformers, the phase shift between the primary and secondary side is not always 180 degrees. Therefore, it is important to model the winding loss for a coupled inductor accurately. The winding loss can be calculated from the resistance matrix, which is independent of excitations but only relates to the frequency and geometry. The methodology to derive the resistance matrix from winding losses of coupled inductors is discussed. Winding loss model with 2D magnetic field is improved by including the additional eddy current loss for better accuracy for the plate-core structures. The resistance matrix calculated from the model is verified by both measurement results and finite-element simulation (FES) of coupled-inductor prototypes. Accurate core loss model is required for designing magnetic components in power converters. Most existing core loss models are based on frequency domain calculation and they cannot be implemented in SPICE simulations. The core loss model in the time domain is discussed in Chapter 5 for arbitrary current excitations. An effective ac flux density is derived to simplify the core loss calculation with non-uniform field distribution. A sub-circuit for core loss simulation is established in LTSPICE that is capable of being integrated to the power stage simulation. Transient behavior and accurate simulation results from the LTSPICE matches very well with the FES results. An equivalent circuit for coupled windings is developed for inductors with significant fringing effect. The equivalent circuit is derived from a physical model that captures the flux paths by having a leakage inductor and two mutual inductors on the primary and secondary side. A mutual resistor is added to each side in parallel with one mutual inductor to model the winding loss with open circuit and phase-shift impact. Two time-varying resistors are employed to represent the core loss in the time-domain. The equivalent circuit is verified by both finite-element simulation (FES) and prototypes fabricated with flexible circuit.