Hello everyone, Sotiris here! 👋

🚀  In last week’s Newsletter we simulated a 500W LLC Transformer, copying the performance of the one used in a TI Application Note. This week, we will try to identify the weak spot of that design and we’ll make a brand-new iteration of that transformer.

Ready to follow me in this process? Let’s start.

👀 Investigating…

In Figure 1 you can see the performance image that we showed in the previous Newsletter. 

Figure 1. Performance of the simulated transformer VS app note thermal image.

🧐 Now the question is, where is the design’s weak spot? And by weak spot I mean looking at the temperature at different places on the Transformer. Focusing on the Transformer thermal image under test, we can easily notice a ~20°C difference between the temperature of the windings and the one of the core. In the simulation, which again isn’t an exact one because of the lack of data, we can come up with an observation about the hotspot location at the center leg of the Transformer.

The core losses elevate the core temperature. The skin, proximity and fringing losses elevate the temperature at the windings. But the windings and the core conduct heat between them because they are thermally coupled with the bobbin as a medium.

⚠️ That said, the weak spot of many Transformer designs is usually located in the center leg. That’s the area where we don’t have any air convection, plus the fact the center leg is in contact with the bobbin, which can easily make the temperature rise even more.

Therefore, the hypothesis is that the weak spot here is the temperature of the center leg. That is not obvious in the thermal image, but it is clear in the simulation graph on the right. That might be true, but unfortunately there isn’t a way to just lower the temperature of the Transformer’s center leg.

💡 What can we do?

• Plan A: Decrease the core losses.
• Plan B: Decrease the winding losses.
• Plan C: Decrease both the core and the winding losses.
• Plan D: Change the ratio of losses closer to 50-50, keeping the total losses (core + winding) approximately the same.
• Plan E: Change the ratio of losses closer to 50-50 and decrease the total losses.

Out of the five options, Plan E is definitely the best one, and I’ve decided this will be my approach in this case: lowering the core and the winding losses, whilst trying to keep a 50-50 balance. Seeking to list the other plans by effectiveness is debatable, and it depends on the design.

🔎 The game of conflicts

Let’s focus on the plan now. Plan E’s mission starts with lowering the core losses.

To control the flux density, we must change the number of primary/secondary turns. That means that the wire length used for the Transformer is longer, resulting in more resistance and more losses in the windings.

Figure 2. Increasing the turns affects power losses

I aimed at increasing the number of turns to a point where core losses decrease, but not so much as to cause an abrupt increase in winding losses. How aggressively we increase the turns of the primary (and the secondary to maintain the turns ratio) is going to dictate if the winding losses will increase a lot or not.

⚙️ We can see in Figure 2 that 57% of the losses are from the core, and 43% of the losses are from the winding. Although the ratio of losses isn’t that bad, the core losses by themselves (in Watts) are significant. That is supported by the fact that the peak flux density swings, which dictates that the core losses are close to 200mT. Literature suggest 100-150mT as a nice operating point. There is no reason why we cannot operate at 200-250mT whatsoever, except the fact that the core losses increase roughly at about the 2.7^th power of the flux density swing.

I run the numbers going from 200mT -> 150mT and that would equate to 50-55% less core losses for the same core. But my goal is to go from 24T to 30T at the primary, which is problematic given the bobbin space that I have. Truth is, initially I went for it and changed the windings, only to realize that the space of the bobbin forced me to change the windings altogether. That increased the winding losses more than I was comfortable with, meaning that at the end the total power losses didn’t decrease so much.

⚡ Therefore, I picked a slightly bigger core. I was lucky enough that the next standard core didn’t have much bigger dimensions, as shown in Figure 3. What it does have though is 34% higher volume and 22% more effective area (A_e) which is what we are actually interested in.

Figure 3. Old vs New core.

Remember back in Newsletter 10 Faraday’s law? 

As Faraday’s simply suggests, the number of primary turns for a 22% increased A_e will decrease by 18%. In other words, we need less turns for the same operating ∆B_pk.

OLD 🆚 NEW design

You can find all the Magnetics that we design in our Newsletters in the Frenetic Library section.

To get to the point now I choose 28T for the primary turns, that translates into 137mT of flux density swing. Given the fact that the bobbin space has increased (Figure 3) as well, I’ll give this solution a try. In Figure 4 you can see comparison between the two designs.

Figure 4. Old vs New LLC transformer performance and specs.

✨ Conclusions

Figure 5. 3D Render of the new LLC transformer.

What have we achieved here in the new LLC transformer version?

✅ Core losses dropped by 1.27W or by 46%.

✅ Winding losses stayed the same!

✅ Total losses decreased by 26.4%

🎖️ PLAN E was successfully achieved!

Moreover:

✅ Transformer dimensions increased only by WxHxD(mm): 6x3.5x4.8

✅ The hotspot temperature dropped to 59°C from 88°C (natural convection)

😎  Stay tuned!  

🚀​ Meet Frenetic Team at APEC Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition!

Visit us at booth 1106 and get to know how Frenetic is changing the Power Electronics Industry. Our experts will present the 2D Model for Winding Proximity Losses, the new Core Panel, and many other features of our platform.

Sotiris Zorbas, MSc 

Power Εlectronics Εngineer