Preliminary Design Method in Power Electronics

When a designer of power electronics systems is involved in a pre-design process, i.e. the definition of the system specifications, he/she has to overcome several difficulties. The first is to find, based on its experience and literature, all the architectures, conversion topologies and component technologies that can meet the needs of the system.From this list of possibilities, the designer must eliminate a certain number of them via qualitative or quantitative arguments until only a small number remains. It is essential for the designer that he/she knows the design limits of each remaining choices to define with certainty the product development plan and the future design issues to be solved. In other words, it must define the correct problem formulation.Having a method to achieve this objective with confidence and on schedule is highly desirable. This is the purpose of this thesis.We therefore propose a new approach based on preliminary design by optimization in the continuous (imaginary) world of power electronics systems. The proposed method uses an optimization algorithm based on the calculation of the gradient of the system model. This algorithm allows to manage a very large number of design parameters, in other words to explore a wide range of solutions in the imaginary world. It thereforerequires continuous and differentiable models of power electronics systems with continuous (imaginary) optimization variables despite the discrete nature of the components used in electronics.The present thesis work has thus consisted in proposing continuous and derivable optimization models of an interleaved Buck converter used in an aircraft called "Stratobus" and validating these optimization models by an experimental approach on a complete prototype. These models have then been used for the pre-dimensioning of this converter as part of the Stratobus project. Firstly a study on the conduction mode and magnetic materialsminimizing the mass of the converter has been performed. And then the impact of variation of the specifications on the mass of the converter has been analyzed. Finally, since the converters are built from electronic components chosen off the shelf, a discretization procedure has been set up to return to the real world.