Integrated filter in electrolytic capacitor technology for implementation in high power density industrial drives

Passive components assemblies pose a bottleneck in meeting an ever increasing demand for high power densities in power electronics systems. They are mostly built with discrete components that come from different manufacturers, are very diverse in shapes and not geometrically optimised to fit with each other. The use of integration technologies in passive component assemblies results in higher integration levels, better spatial design and integration of these assemblies in the system. Furthermore, reductions in cost and size are expected due to less material used, fewer manufacturing processes and simplified assembly. In this paper, electromagnetic integration in electrolytic capacitor technology for the implementation of a passive components assembly is presented. The paper shows the integration of the DC link filter in a 2.2 kW industrial drive, including a low pass filter and a DC link EMI filter in this technology. Some technological challenges including interconnections, thermal management, can manufacturing etc. are discussed. It is shown that by replacing the discrete DC link filter with the integrated filter, the volume of the input EMI filter can be reduced significantly thereby achieving the total passive components volume reduction of 45% while still complying with the EMI standards.