Abstract

A comprehensive and generic medium frequency transformer (MFT) design methodology is presented in this paper, which can be applied to many transformer structures. Models were found or developed to cover all the necessary calculation, with emphasis on the balance between computation time and accuracy, leading to a fast and efficient design tool. Numerous MFT designs are available at the end with the possibility to choose the best candidate. A multi-megawatt offshore windfarm converter application was chosen to show the optimization procedure of the MFT design inside such a converter. The best potential design was retained and validated by numerous finite element simulations. This procedure was repeated for various MFT structures in order to perform a quantitative comparison of many different combinations of technological choices. This study can give insights on the best technological choices to be used for MFTs, and also shows significant differences in performance between structures.

Alexis Fouineau, Martin Guillet, Bruno Lefebvre, Marie-Ange Raulet, Fabien Sixdenier

Presented at EVER 2020