High voltage high frequency resonant DC-DC converter for electric propulsion for micro and nanosatellites

This paper presents a high power density DC-DC converter for electric propulsion of micro and nanosatellites. The front end of the proposed topology consists of a full-bridge LLC resonant converter. LLC resonant converter is particularly chosen since this resonant tank yields significant voltage boost without addition of external components to the resonant tank while operating in the lagging current mode. Subsequently, a novel magnetic flux addition design is proposed for doubling the V/N of transformer so as to reduce the number of turns by half in secondary side. Moreover, quadrupler rectifier is proposed to rectify the voltage in place of conventional full bridge or Cockcroft voltage multiplier. The design and analysis of proposed transformer is presented along with the design of high voltage DC-DC converter. Simulation of proposed transformer is carried out in COMSOL whereas the DC-DC converter simulation is carried out on PSIM 9.0 based software platform. Hardware results are presented for scaled down prototype.