Evaluation of temperature effect on inductance computation in variable magnetic components for Dual-Active-Bridge application

This work presents a thorough study of the impact of the operating temperature of the magnetic core on the computed value of the inductance in a power electronic converter at different operation conditions. The analysis is specifically interesting in the case of variable magnetic components. In general, the core temperature varies as a function of several parameters, such as the ambient temperature, the excitation current applied to the inductor windings -which causes core and winding losses and results in heating of the magnetic material- and finally the thermal conductivity of the magnetic material. To decouple the different factors affecting the inductance, Finite Element Analysis simulations are carried out for a variable inductor as a case study. Reinforced by this analysis, a final lookup table/map is proposed to accurately scale the inductance variation range predicted by the analytical design methods in order to match the practical measurements under different excitation currents.