#97🚀 The Total Component & Love and Food

SuperPowers for Electrical Engineers 🦸🏻‍♂️🦸🏼‍♀️

👋 Hello, friends! Dr. Molina here 👨‍🔧

Welcome to my newsletter! Here, on a weekly basis, I share my personal journey of building a company in the power electronics industry and the exciting new insights I gain about the world of Magnetics.

Every night, Love and Food

At night, something magical happens in my house. After bathing my daughter, I stay with her, giving her the bottle in her room to lull her to sleep in my arms, and I wish time would stand still. It's a magical moment where I feel her breathing against my chest as she takes the bottle and gradually falls asleep. I tell her I love her, wish her a good night, and focus on savoring every moment. When I put her in her crib, I remember a quote from Paco León, a Spanish actor, who said:

Babies need love and food.

And I pour all my love into caring for her. Sometimes, it's a bit challenging for her to fall asleep, and she sits up, lies down, sits up... and I hug her. Sometimes, I don't want her to fall asleep so I can spend a little more time with her.

This is something that happens the same way in Madrid as it does in San Francisco, it doesn't matter. With love and food, you raise a child.

The Total Component

The parasitic capacitance in transformers is one of my favorite topics to read and research, and during this process, sometimes I find very interesting works from others. I watched a YouTube video of my friend Sam Ben-Yakoov [1] (Take care during these difficult days). He mentioned the work from some engineers in South Africa, where they integrated in a single package a transformer and a capacitor and I said, WoW!

Here is the reference.

So, let’s see what they did.

They chose a resonant topology to validate this concept, where they can integrate transformer + resonant network of series inductor and capacitor in a single component, so they called this topology partial series resonant converter (PSRC). They chose 1kW and 1 MHz switching frequency with a turn ratio of 1, 250V input and output.

In the picture below you can see the details.

This is a demonstrator project, so the efficiency is not optimized and neither is the design, so don´t expect 99% efficiency in the design.

Building the integrated package

To build this integrated component, they have decided to create a series inductance by adding ferrite sheets between the winding and increasing dispersion.

For the capacitances, they have decided to add a dielectric between the copper layers of the primary winding, creating an L-C network. To create the dielectric, they used a ferroceramic material.

The primary L-C network is built with six ceramic tiles. A conducted layer is bound to each side of the ceramic tiles as seen below.

The resulting integration looks like this, with a custom E53 core using 3F3. The same material was used for the leakage inductance.

The resonant frequency is 1,1MHz, which is very close to the switching frequency. I see this fact as an essential fact to consider in the design of these components.

They didn´t work on the details of the loss estimation, but they measured and gave some figures about the tolerance of the measurements.

They measure the input and output real-time power of the system using an oscilloscope.

To be honest, I have tried this, and I couldn´t get a trusted value due to the phase shift between current and voltages. The results make sense but do not represent an optimal design (87% efficiency).

Conclusion

My conclusion here is that it’s possible to integrate L-C networks and transformers in a single component and the main challenges are mechanical and material. I would say, as a business, I would work on a custom structure with customized values in a specific range, chasing 99% efficiency and easy footprint. Do you want to participate? I’m IN; count with my money.

See you next week!!

Before you go…

The second big announcement of September is about something we are working…in the next months, we will share a big new product of Frenetic, which is related to our..

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If you liked it, I encourage you to share this post with your friends or on social media, which will help me to continue writing content for free.

[1] Video of Sam Ben-Yakoov