Weight and Efficiency Optimized DC/DC Converter based on Multiple Interleaved Channels

Today, energy saving is one of the main objectives for engineers. In the case of mobile applications, energy can be saved by two different ways. First, decreasing the total masse of the system, and second, increasing the efficiency of the overall system. This paper presents two optimization strategies to design a predefined multichannel structure of a boost converter dedicated to a solar airplane and used to interface PV panels and the battery system. The first strategy is a multi-criterion method able to trace the dependency between the converter’s efficiency and its power density through the intermediary of the Pareto front. The second method, a mono-criterion approach, maximizes efficiency while respecting the constraint imposed on power density. The mono-criterion method applied to maximizing the European efficiency criterion showed that an increase in the number of channels increased the quantity of energy collected over a day by increasing the power density of the converter. At the end of the paper, the optimal design calculated was build to give an example of the result obtained by this design methodology. The results of the efficiency measurements made on a realized prototype are presented in this paper.