Design of On-board Power Supply for Tether Drone Applications

This paper presents the design of an on-board power supply for the tether drone system used in commercial and military applications. The power supply is crucial for delivering DC power to the propulsion and control systems of the tethered drone. This paper proposes an interleaved LLC resonant converter as the main topology and presents the design and implementation of the converter and control circuits. The integrated magnetic design of the transformer and inductor is also proposed to improve the power density of the converter. The proposed techniques were applied to a 1.6kW converter with input/output voltages of 400V/50V, and experimental results are provided to verify the design of the proposed scheme.