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Enhanced DAB for Efficiency Preservation Using Adjustable-Tap High-

Frequency Transformer

Article  in  IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics · December 2019

DOI: 10.1109/TPEL.2019.2958632

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1

Enhanced DAB for Efficiency Preservation using

Adjustable-Tap High-Frequency Transformer
Armin Jafari, Mohammad Samizadeh Nikoo, Furkan Karakaya and Elison Matioli, Member, IEEE

Abstract—Efficient DC-DC power-conversion with wide-span switching frequency would significantly reduce the overall the
voltage-regulation is crucial to a sustainable and robust power size of DAB as well as its core loss [5].
electronics system. Dual-active-bridge (DAB) offers straight- GaN technology offers smaller gate-capacitance and ON-
forward regulation and its transformer enables voltage step-
resistance. Improvements in dynamic ON-resistance [6] and
up/down required for many applications, such as battery
chargers and bus converters for DC distribution systems. Coss-related losses [7], [8] promise efficient operation of soft-
However, losing soft-switching at light loads or when operating at switched DAB at very high frequencies, with the
voltage gains far from the turns ratio severely degrades the aforementioned advantage of shrinking passive components.
efficiency of DAB, especially at high switching frequencies. In However, maintaining soft-switching is critical for a high-
this work, we demonstrate an enhanced DAB (E-DAB) topology frequency DAB, because hard-switching losses scale up with
which employs an adjustable-tap transformer to extend the soft-
frequency and cause not only drastic drop in efficiency, but
switching over wider voltage gains and increase the power-
transfer capability. By a proper tap adjustment and with single also risk of thermal runaway and device failure. Several
phase-shift modulation, the proposed GaN-based converter methods have been proposed in the literature to extend the
achieved a peak efficiency of 97.4% with an overall efficiency soft-switching region of DAB. Among them, increasing the
greater than a conventional DAB for voltage gains of up to 2.8 dead-time could improve the soft-switching at light loads at
times higher. Employing a quasi-planar matrix transformer with the cost of degrading the efficiency at heavy loads; moreover,
integrated leakage inductance at 300 kHz allowed for an
when the inductor current reaches zero, increasing dead-time
extremely high power density of 10 kW/l (7.5 kW/l with cooling).
The tapped transformer did not incur extra losses to the does not help at all, leading to more losses [9]. Various
topology. The gain versus power-transfer characteristic for soft- modulation schemes could also broaden the region for soft-
switching operation was derived for the E-DAB and its switching [9]–[12], but the laborious calculations involved in
improvement in efficiency was experimentally verified over a those methods are difficult to be performed at high switching
wide power range. frequency due to the limited computation and time-resolution
Index Terms—DAB, E-DAB, Variable-tap transformer, Wide in controllers and drivers. Another solution is to utilize
voltage-gain, Tap-changer, Soft-switching, High frequency, resonance to extend the soft-switching region by adding extra
Efficiency preservation, GaN, High power density, High components, passive or active (not lossless), which add to the
efficiency.
design size and complexity [10], [12], [13] and lead to
electromagnetic interference issues as the increased gain is
I. INTRODUCTION
based on frequency modulation [14]. DC blocking capacitor

A dual active bridge (DAB) converter can be regarded as a

regulated DC transformer, capable of adjusting its output
voltage under varying load and input voltage conditions. It
together with a new modulation scheme is proposed in [15]
and the method could successfully increase efficiency for
voltage gains around 2 p.u. but deteriorates the performance
controls the power flow bi-directionally and provides under normal operating conditions. The improved
isolation, which is important for safety and protection performance depends on the proper choice of the blocking
schemes. Thus, DAB is of great interest for a wide range of capacitor and the B-H curve of the transformer is prone to
applications, including electric vehicle chargers, avionics, shifting which brings forward the need to deploy an extra
uninterruptable power supplies, DC micro-grid distribution saturation prevention algorithm [16]. Combining DAB with
networks, converters for renewable energy harvesting and elementary buck and boost converters as a composite
telecommunications [1]–[4]. The power transfer in DAB is converter is proposed in [17], achieving outstanding light-load
inductive, in which the transformer series inductance is efficiency extension; however, it comes at the price of losing
responsible for power transfer and achieving soft-switching, the galvanic isolation and is suited when the difference
and the turns ratio of the transformer provides the desired between input and output voltage levels is relatively small.
voltage step-up/down. The increased complexities in control make this approach less
The large size of these magnetic components limits the applicable at high frequencies. In [18], a planar transformer
power density at low switching frequency therefore increasing with two taps is used to successfully extend the soft-switching
The authors are with the Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research
Laboratory (POWERlab), École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL),
range and reduce circulating currents in DAB. However, due
CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland (e-mail: [email protected] to the small leakage inductance in planar transformers [5],
[email protected]). [19], an external inductor has to be added in series with the

0885-8993 (c) 2019 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TPEL.2019.2958632, IEEE
Transactions on Power Electronics
2

transformer at high-voltage side, which limits the converter (a) DAB (b) E-DAB
power density, as designing small efficient inductors at high 3 3
1.5n
n
frequency is challenging [20]. Different tap-changer 2.5 2.5

mechanisms are studied in [21]. Simulation shows the

Normalized Gain
Normalized Gain
2 2

advantage of using tap changer for lower semiconductor loss 1.5 1.5
and smaller transformer current and measurements at voltage 1 1
gains equal to the nominal tap value supports the generality
0.5 0.5
without investigating different gain conditions. 0.5n
In this work, we demonstrate an enhanced DAB (E-DAB) 0
0 30 60 90
0
0 30 60 90
to increase the power-transfer capability and broaden the Phase Shift (Degrees) Phase Shift (Degrees)

voltage gain under which the converter still maintains soft- Fig. 1. Normalized gain versus phase shift in (a) DAB and (b) E-DAB. The
shaded region represents soft-switching which is significantly extended for the
switching without adding lossy components or complicating proposed E-DAB especially at lower phase shifts, the equivalent of light-load
the modulation. By introducing a tapped quasi-planar matrix operation.
transformer with integrated leakage inductance, a high power
density converter is realized, as no external inductors are III. TRANSFORMER AND CONVERTER DESIGN
required. A gain versus power-transfer analysis is presented to To examine the proposed method, we designed a matrix
characterize the behavior of the E-DAB for efficient operation, transformer equipped with a mechanical tap-changer shown in
which is of great significance to design a controller system for Fig. 2a. The matrix consists of toroidal cores (R22.1x13.7x7.9
such converters. The proposed analysis is experimentally N49 ferrite material) with Litz wires (1050/#42 for primary
verified by comparing the E-DAB to a conventional DAB and 66/#42 for secondary). The ratio n varies between 9 to 12,
under the same operating conditions. The E-DAB is suitable with steps of one, providing +20/-10% of adjustment from the
for many power applications with large variations in load and nominal value of 1:10. Due to the special winding geometry,
source power, such as photovoltaics, wind power. transformer’s leakage inductance Lr is large enough for power
transfer and there is no need for adding any external inductors.
II. METHODOLOGY The change in tap could modify transformer’s parameters,
Power transfer for single-phase DAB when single phase especially Lr, and therefore the predicted soft-switching
shift (SPS) modulation is employed, can be expressed as extension would not be achieved as desired, since (2) assumes
  a fixed value for Lr. To verify this, the short-circuit parameters
V V ( )(1   ) of the transformer were measured with E4990A Impedance
P  IN OUT  (1)
2nfSWLr Analyzer. As shown in Fig. 2b, increasing the tap value by
in which VIN and VOUT are DC link voltages for primary and 33% from 9 to 12, modified Lr by less than 4%, which
secondary respectively, φ is the phase shift between them, fsw guarantees that the theoretical limits still hold. The parasitic
is switching frequency, Lr and n are the leakage inductance AC resistance of the windings, presented in Fig. 2c, does not
and turns ratio of the transformer, respectively. As formulated vary much in the frequency of interest, which ensures that
in (1), changing n not only can control the power flow (and changing the tap is not adding any extra losses to the topology.
hence regulate the voltage), but is also an important parameter The E-DAB converter is shown in Fig. 3a for which GaN
determining the soft-switching region, under which the transistors EPC2031 and GS66502B were used for the primary
transistors operate with the least stress and power dissipation. and secondary bridges, respectively, (as demonstrated in Figs.
To achieve soft-switching, the current through Lr should be 3b, c). We designed a four-layer PCB with minimized gate
large enough to discharge the output capacitance of the and power loop inductances for safe performance of the
switches in the bridge, which means that the actual gain G of transistors. Ceramic capacitors are placed beside and on the
the DAB should stay within the defined constraints bottom side of each leg in the full-bridges. Transistors are
driven by SI8271 isolated gate-drivers with dead-time values
2 n (2) of 20 ns and 40 ns for primary and secondary switches,
n(1   )  G 
2
1  respectively. PWM signals from TMS320F28379D DSP are
The limits of (2) applied to DAB with turns ratio n is connected to the converter using shielded cables with MMCX
illustrated in Fig. 1a in which the shaded area shows the soft- connectors. and 5-V isolated DC/DC converters on the bottom
switching region. Fig. 1b shows the corresponding limits for layer supply the gate drivers. This combination allowed us to
an E-DAB which is capable of varying its turns ratio between design the transformer to operate at 300 kHz for small
0.5n and 1.5n. a broader the soft-switching region is obtained footprint as well as reduced core loss due to the inverse
over wider gain ranges, especially at lower phase shifts, which relation between switching frequency and magnetic flux
is the equivalent of light-load operation in which the normal density B [5]. The auxiliary power and cooling are provided
DAB suffers from hard-switching. As (1) suggests, the externally. The tap-changer mechanism in this design is
variable turns ratio provides adjustable power-transfer realized using small electromagnetic (EM) relays, capable of
capability for the E-DAB. Utilizing a tapped transformer along switching 2 A. The taps are placed at the secondary side with
with a tap-changer is the only requirement to extend soft- low current and high voltage. For better lifetime and faster
switching range and achieve an adjustable power-transfer response time, one could use solid-state tap changers,
capability. however, the efficiency might be slightly lower [21].

0885-8993 (c) 2019 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
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Transactions on Power Electronics
3

Secondary
60 600
Winding
Electromagnetic ϕ
Relay 40 400

20 200

VSEC (V)
VPRI (V)
Primary
Winding 0 0

-20 -200

-40 -400

-60 -600
(a) Ferrite Core Relay Drive -3000 -2000 -1000 0 1000 2000 3000

90 Time (ns)
1160
Fig. 4. Primary voltage (VPRI) and secondary voltage (VSEC) waveforms of
Tap Tap
Increase Increase the high-frequency matrix transformer operating with SPS modulation at 300
1130 1:9 60 kHz. φ determines the level of transferred power as well as its direction.
RAC (mΩ)

1:10
Lr (nH)

1:9
1:11 1:10
1100 1:12
30 1:11 different tap values was measured for different input powers
1:12
(Fig. 5) while the input voltage was matched with the nominal
1070 0 gain of each tap, i.e. output voltage divided by n. The power
0 300 600 900 1200 1500 0 300 600 900 1200 1500
(b) f (kHz) (c) f (kHz)
transfer at each tap is a function of φ, and the input voltage in
which the converter operates efficiently could be significantly
Fig. 2. (a) High-frequency matrix transformer with tap-changer and taps extended using proper turns ratio. Furthermore, when a high
varying between 1:9 to 1:12. (b) leakage inductance Lr and (c) AC resistance
(RAC) of the transformer measured with E4990A Keysight Impedance
power-transfer is required and even maximum φ cannot be
Analyzer. The variation of Lr is less than 4% over frequency and RAC is not sufficient to reach the required target power, changing turns
affected by changing the taps in the frequency of interest. ratio increases the power-transfer capability of the converter,
as indicated by (1). EM relays can be actuated under different
(a) Low-voltage Primary load conditions as they are able to conduct and block current
DC Link Full bridge
in both directions [22]. However, in many applications such as
battery charging and renewable energy harvesting, the power
transfer could be interrupted momentarily to provide low-
25 mm

High-voltage
DC Link
stress operation of EM relays for improving their lifetime. We
compared the efficiency of the DAB with E-DAB at the same
input and output voltage conditions, and at a relatively light-
load of 200 W at the output (Fig. 6). The DAB converter was
High-frequency realized by keeping the EM relay at tap 10 closed (ON) all the
Transformer time, when the other EM relays are open (OFF). This tap was
selected as it provides the step up required for nominal
Primary (c) operation of the converter between 40-V and 400-V DC-links,
Tap-changer
Full bridge Mechanism under which the transformer core loss is small. Furthermore,
Auxiliary we could compare this tap with higher (11,12) and lower (9)
(b) (c)
Power taps in the E-DAB, for demonstrating the performance at both
ranges. In Fig. 6, E-DAB was operated with larger taps for the
PWM lower-end input voltages and for higher input voltages, smaller
taps were used. Both converters overlap when E-DAB utilizes
turns ratio equal to that of the DAB, i.e. 10. For all the rest of
EPC2031 the input voltages, the E-DAB outperformed DAB in terms of
efficiency and the peak efficiency was boosted from 96.5% in
Isolation GS66502B DAB to 97.4% in E-DAB for 30% higher voltage gain and at a
light load of 200 W, equivalent to 20% of the E-DAB power-
DC Link
Isolated
Gate-driver
transfer capability.
Capacitor Fig. 6 also shows that E-DAB preserved the higher efficiency
Fig. 3. (a) E-DAB converter with high-frequency variable-tap transformer. down to 14 V of input voltage, which corresponds to a gain
(b) Primary full bridge and (c) secondary full bridge utilize GaN technology. 2.8 times higher than the nominal gain of DAB. The E-DAB is
not only better for increasing the efficiency, but also reducing
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND ANALYSIS losses in the switches mitigates concerns about thermal
runaway with the same cooling effort. The E-DAB converter
Using SPS modulation resulted in the generation of square-
does not require cooling over a wide range of power and gain,
wave voltages on the transformer primary and secondary as
as it operates highly efficient. At 300 kHz, power capability of
illustrated in Fig. 4. The output voltage of the converter was
regulated at 400V by changing φ together with n at a constant the E-DAB is 1 kW, resulting in a power density of 10 kW/l
(7.5 kW/l including forced-air cooling and gate driver supply).
load. Under these conditions, the efficiency of the DAB for
Due to the extension of soft-switching, the EMI performance

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TPEL.2019.2958632, IEEE
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DAB E-DAB
98
98 (a) 44 7 (b) 44 7

34 34
5 5
96 24 24

VGS (V)
VGS (V)
VDS (V)

VDS (V)
96
3 3
14 14
ϕ 58.6°
= 1 1
4 4
=ϕ 71.6°
Efficiency (%)

94
94
=ϕ 80.2° -6 -1 -6 -1
ϕ 88.9°
= -40 -20 0 20 40 60 -40 -20 0 20 40 60

(c) Time (ns) (d) Time (ns)

92
92
32 7 32 7
Tap 9
Tap10 22 5 22 5

VGS (V)
VDS (V)

VDS (V)

VGS (V)
90
90 Tap11
12 3 12 3
Tap12
2 1 2 1
88
88
100
100 200 400 700 1000
1000 -8 -1 -8 -1
-40 -20 0 20 40 60 -40 -20 0 20 40 60
Power (W)
Time (ns) Time (ns)
Fig. 5. Efficiency of E-DAB versus its input power for different taps at a Fig. 7. Turn-ON voltage waveforms of a low-side primary switch. At
fixed output voltage of 400 V and the gain equal to the tap value. Tap value voltage gain of 12 (a) DAB undergoes partial soft-switching, whereas (b) the
determines power transfer and increases the power capability when the phase same switch in E-DAB is fully soft-switched for the same power. Increasing
shift reaches its theoretical limit for transferring more power, i.e. 90°. The the gain to 17.4 (c) DAB is hard-switched and the drain-to-source voltage is
proper tap selection leads to increase of efficiency at light and heavy loads. clamped to DC-Link, incurring extra reverse conduction loss in the high-side
switch, while (d) E-DAB still has the capability to be partially soft-switched,
98
which leads to a higher overall efficiency and less switch stress in E-DAB.
P = 200 W
The waveforms are measured with Tektronix TPP1000 1 GHz probes.
97 35
Tap 12
96 30 Tap 11
Efficiency (%)

Tap 10
25 Tap 9
95 ZVS
Limit Power-transfer Limit
Gain, G

20 (Maximum φ)
94
G = 15.5
15
DAB
93
E-DAB 10

92
10 20 30 40 50 5 ZVS Limit
Input voltage (V)
0
Fig. 6. Efficiency comparison between DAB and E-DAB when a constant 0 200 400 600 800 1000
load of 200W is supplied at 400V at the output. The E-DAB outperforms the
Power (W)
DAB over the whole input voltage sweep. This translates into less stress and
risk of thermal runaway for the switches by significantly shrinking the total Fig. 8 Voltage gain (G) versus power at which the E-DAB achieves soft-
switching using different tap values. ZVS limits as well as power-transfer
loss up to almost 50% at the same output power and input/output voltage
constraint due to maximum phase shift are specified for each tap. E-DAB
conditions.
promises extension of power-transfer capability as well as higher efficiency
under light and heavy loads. Experimental results of Fig. 9 verifies the validity
of E-DAB is better, which again is of great importance for of the analysis for G=15.5, in which E-DAB outperforms DAB in terms of
high-frequency converter design based on GaN. For example, efficiency over a wide power range.
hard-switching leads to higher voltage ringing on the gate-
drive loop and with narrow gate breakdown voltage of GaN Besides the extension of efficiency over wider gain ranges
at a fixed power, E-DAB improves the efficiency over wide
devices, there is a risk of device failure at its gate. Fig. 7
range of transferred power when a fixed gain is required. For a
shows the drain-to-source and gate-to-source voltages of the
fixed output voltage, one can solve the limits for G as
primary low-side switches under the same load of 200 W but
indicated by (2) for different values of φ and use (1) to obtain
different input voltages, during the turn ON transition. Figs. a gain versus power-transfer characteristic plane for the E-
7a, b correspond to 34 V input voltage, equivalent to a 12-time DAB. Combined with the power-transfer limit due to
voltage gain. While the transition in DAB is partially soft, the maximum φ, such characteristic specifies the operating range
E-DAB achieves a full zero-voltage-switching (ZVS). Figs. under which E-DAB is soft-switched over different n values.
7c, d show the input voltage of 23V, equivalent to a gain of The characteristic plane is presented in Fig. 8 for the E-DAB
17.4. E-DAB achieves a partial soft-switching while the DAB operating at 400 V at the output DC-link. We experimentally
could not achieve soft-switching even if the dead-time was verified the analysis by comparing the E-DAB with DAB at a
extended, since the current in the leakage inductance dropped fixed voltage gain of 15.5. As shown in Fig. 9 E-DAB
to almost zero. As a result, an overshoot occurs in drain-to- preserved higher efficiency compared to the DAB for the
source voltage of Fig. 7c due to the reverse conduction of the whole power sweep range and boosted the efficiency by 5% at
high-side switch, incurring more losses in the DAB.

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TPEL.2019.2958632, IEEE
Transactions on Power Electronics
5

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