Toroidal Inductor Design and Comparison Between Interleaved and Non-Interleaved 300 kW High Efficiency SiC Inverter

For high power inverters with SiC semiconductors, simple converter topologies offer benefits in cost and efficiency. Converters at 300 kW and higher might require paralleling of semiconductors. In this work, hard-paralleling and interleaving approaches for high power converters are compared based on cost and efficiency. A method to compare these configurations including designing the switching inductor with application specific requirements is described. Such requirements may reduce the benefit of filter size reduction that comes with the higher switching frequency of SiC converters. A tool has been developed in MATLAB to obtain valid toroidal powder core inductor designs including saturation requirements. PLECS modeling is used to quantify semiconductor losses. Experimental validation of saturation characteristics with the final selected inductor is presented. A simple method to use voltage and current data from a double pulse test setup to obtain the experimental saturation characteristics of the switching inductor is presented.