Investigation of a GaN-Based Power Supply Topology Utilizing Solid State Transformer for Low Power Applications

Gallium nitride (GaN) power devices exhibit a much lower gate capacitance for a similar on-resistance than its silicon counterparts, making it highly desirable for high-frequency operation in switching converters, which leads to their significant benefits on power density, cost, and system volume. High-density switching converters are being realized with GaN power devices due to their high switching speeds that reduce the size of energy-storage circuit components. The purpose of this dissertation research is to investigate a new isolated GaN AC/DC switching converter based on solid-state transformer configuration with a totem-pole power factor corrector (PFC) front-end, a half-bridge series-resonant converter (SRC) for power conversion, and a current-doubler rectifier (CDR) at its output. A new equivalent circuit model for the converter is constructed consisting of a loss-free resistor model for the PFC rectifier with first harmonic approximation model for the SRC and the CDR. Then, state-space analysis is performed to derive the converter transfer function in order to design the controllers to yield sufficient phase margins. The converter offers the advantages of voltage regulation feature of the solid-state transformer, low harmonics and close-to-unity power factor of the PFC rectifier, soft-switching of the half-bridge SRC, reduced size of the high-frequency transformer, and smaller leakage inductance of the CDR which is used for low-voltage high-current applications as the CDR draws half of the load current in the transformer secondary side yielding less copper losses. A high-frequency nanocrystalline toroid transformer, based on a modified equation to determine its leakage inductance, is designed and fabricated to satisfy the performance specifications of the converter. A meticulously planned gate driving strategy together with a Kelvin-source return circuitry is used to mitigate Miller effects, minimize gate ringing, and minimize the parasitics of the pull-down and pull-up loops of the converter. A new programming method that combines MATLAB Simulink embedded coder with code composer studio for the TMS320F28335 digital signal processor (DSP) controller is developed and demonstrated. Finally, the GaN-based AC/DC converter is experimentally verified for a 120Vac to 48Vdc/60Vdc conversion operating at 100 kHz for various loadings