Design considerations of high voltage and high frequency three phase transformer for Solid State Transformer application

The three-phase Solid State Transformer (SST) is one of the key elements in the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDM) System. The SST consists of an input rectifier, Dual Active Bridge (DAB) bidirectional dc-dc converter and followed by an inverter for ac voltage output. The DAB converter is a bidirectional dc-dc converter using high frequency transformers to step up or down the voltages at high frequency for a reduction in size while maintaining high efficiency and reliability. The single phase high-frequency high-voltage transformer for two-level DAB has been reported by the authors [2]. In this paper, high frequency three-phase transformer for multi-level (3-level) and multi-phase (three-phase) DAB is designed for three-phase multilevel SST. There are two proposed topologies and for each topology the high voltage and high frequency transformer is designed at 3 kHz and 20 kHz. The proposed transformer designs for electromagnetic, thermal and mechanical analysis are validated with the simulation of Finite Element Analysis software.