A Novel Two-Stage Power Conversion Method suitable for LDCs of the Electric Vehicles

The Low Voltage DC-DC converters (LDCs) of the Electric Vehicles require high power density and high efficiency operation over the wide range of load and input voltage variations. This paper introduces a novel topology which combines three 1 MHz Half-Bridge (HB) LLC resonant converters and an Inverting Buck-Boost (IBB) converter to adjust the output voltage without frequency modulation. The switching frequency of the proposed converter is fixed at 1MHz to achieve a constant frequency operation for the resonant converter to achieve a maximum efficiency. In the proposed topology GaN FETs and planar transformers are employed to optimize the converter operation at high frequency. A 1 MHz/1.8 kW prototype converter is built to verify the feasibility and the validity of the proposed LDC topology.