Investigation of Cost-effective SiC Based Hybrid Switch and Improved Inductor Design Procedure for Boost Converter in Electrical Vehicles Application

A cost-effective SiC based hybrid switch and an improved inductor design procedure for boost converter in electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) are presented in this paper. The feasibility of a hybrid switch using low power SiC MOSFET and high power Si IGBT is investigated to provide a cost-effective and failure-resistant method to employ the fast switching characteristics of SiC devices. The operation of the hybrid switch is tested in double pulse test experiment and compared with the single IGBT. Additionally, the boost inductor design is discussed, which allows the optimization of weight and power loss across different core materials. An improved powder core inductor design procedure is presented to avoid the iterative design procedure provided by the manufacture. Both the powder material and nanocrystalline material are considered in the inductor design procedure. The design result demonstrates that the air-gapped nanocrystalline core inductor achieves smaller size, weight and loss compared with the powder core inductor.