Weight reduction of DC/DC converters using controllable inductors

Controllable inductors can be realized by introducing auxiliary windings into the device that partially saturate the core and allow variation of the inductance value. This can be used to achieve zero-voltage switching in a DC/DC converter over a wide load range while at the same time the weight of the inductor is reduced. In this paper the possible size and weight reduction and the influence on the efficiency is calculated and compared to other solutions. The results are verified in a prototype.