A modified area-product method for the design of inductors and transformers

Abstract

A design method which is an improvement over the area-product method (Ramanarayanan. V., Power electronics class notes, 1996) for the design of inductors and transformers working al 50 Hz is proposed in this work. An iterative method is developed over the existing area-product method to achieve an optimal core for a given set of input specifications. A large database of cores and user-interactive software is developed. The contributions made in this work are: (i) a design method for inductors which achieves substantial (30%) savings in the material when compared to the conventional method. (ii) a similar design method for transformers that add more features to the conventional method and (iii) a method to estimate the parasitic leakage inductance (error < 40%) in transfonners based on stored energyprinciples.