A Magnetic Design Method for Powder Core Inductor with Concentrated Airgap Considering DC Superposition Characteristics Used for High Current Applications

Powder cores are attractive magnetic cores for high current applications such as bidirectional dc/dc converters used in power trains of eco-friendly automotive because of their high saturation flux density, high Curie temperature, and soft saturation characteristics. However, powder cores have nonlinear relative permeability characteristics dependent on the magnetic field intensity which results in a drop in the inductance value at high current values. There are two key solutions to keep constant inductance value at maximum power rating of circuit specifications: (1) inserting a concentrated airgap (2) reducing the number of turns to tackle the drop of relative permeability due to dc-bias. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel magnetic design method for powder core inductors with concentrated airgap which to keep the desired inductance constant under dc-bias conditions. The feature of the proposed design methodology is based on considering non-linear relative permeability directly based on the magnetic characteristics modeling. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed by experimental tests using EE core.