Ultrahigh Step-Down Converter With Wide Input Voltage Range Based on Topology Exchange

To overcome the traditional buck converter, which is difficult to achieve a high step-down gain with an appropriate duty cycle, a coupled-inductor-based step-down converter, named ultrahigh step-down converter, is proposed by Hwu et al.[11]. As compared with the buck converter, the ultrahigh step-down converter can achieve a much higher step-down gain, which can be determined by not only the duty cycle but also the turns ratio of the coupled inductor. However, the ultrahigh step-down converter is designed at a fixed input voltage of 48 V. In the telecommunication applications, the high dc bus voltage varies in a wide range, not kept at a fixed nominal voltage of 48 V. The experimental results show that as the input voltage increases, the efficiency of the ultrahigh step-down converter decreases. Therefore, in this paper, an improved ultrahigh step-down converter with a wide input voltage range is presented. According to the topology exchange, the voltage gain can be changed to a suitable one when the input voltage changes. By doing so, as compared with the ultrahigh step-down converter [11], the duty cycle of the proposed converter can be extended, and hence the efficiencies of the proposed converter can be improved. The proposed converter is verified by a wide input voltage (18-54 V), with an output voltage of 1.2 V and a rated output current of 10 A.