Calculation and Verification of High-frequency Losses in Power Inductors for Automotive Application

Abstract:
In modern power electronic systems the magnetics are still the main bottleneck regarding size, losses and thermal behavior. While on the one hand, increasing switching frequencies promise to continuously shrink the size of the inductors, on the other hand, the increasing core- and winding losses need to be handled carefully as well. Various methods for the determination and the optimization of the inductor losses have been reported recently mainly for academic applications. For industrial design processes, these methods are often too time consuming and unhandy. In this paper, we present a method to determine the inductor losses with sufficient precision.