Reconfigurable dual active bridge converter for aircraft applications

The increase of electrical energy consumption in modern aircrafts stimulates manufactures to install a 540V DC bus in future aircrafts, together with the existing 270V and 28V DC buses. Energy transferred between the high voltage DC bus (HVDC, 270V) and the low voltage DC bus (LVDC, 28V) is made by bidirectional isolated DC-DC converters. A performing topology for these types of converters is the Dual Active Bridge (DAB) given its soft switching properties and the low number of components, which allow the converter to be highly compact. This paper introduces a new topology of DAB (named DABRSP) which uses only 4 switches at the high voltage (HV) side and can be used in 270V and 540V DC buses without oversizing switches. Oversizing is observed if regular Full Bridge (FB) or Neutral Point Clamped (NPC) converters are used in the HV side of the DAB. The proposed topology allows Zero Voltage Switching (ZVS) and Zero Current Switching (ZCS) the same way as in a typical DAB converter and it makes uses of a particular transformer to “magnetically” sum up 2-level voltages.