A Systematic Design Method and Verification of a Zero Current Ripple Interface for PV-to-Battery Applications

A systematic method of designing a zero terminal current ripple integrated magnetic Ćuk converter for photovoltaic (PV)-to-battery applications is presented in this paper. The four-winding-coupled inductor design consists of two inductors and a two-winding transformer coupled on a common EE-core. The core design uses a simplified flux-reluctance model to arrive at the area product formulation for this kind of a four-winding structure. The zero-ripple condition in the terminal currents is achieved by controlling the coupling coefficients by means of air-gap reluctances in the core. Unlike the earlier designs for this converter, it provides a completely analytical approach to design this converter for a range of duty ratio. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed using finite element analyses (both two dimensional and three dimensional), thermal validation, and circuit simulations in PSpice. The zero-ripple condition is verified experimentally.