Investigation on Losses with Various Emerging Core and Winding Materials in a High Frequency Planar Transformer

In this work, various emerging core and winding materials suitable for a high frequency planar transformer (PT) has been analyzed and compared. Core and winding materials used in a transformer has a significant effect mostly in the core and winding losses of the transformer. Emerging core materials like amorphous and nanocrystalline cores were compared against the conventional ferrite core. The results obtained showed that core losses were reduced by around 48.14% on using amorphous or nanocrystalline cores instead of the conventional ferrite cores. Typical copper and aluminum windings were also compared with emerging materials like carbon nanotube (CNT), Cu/CNT and Al/CNT. Winding losses was found to be the lowest on using CNT windings instead of metal windings like Cu or Al, or metals composite windings like Cu/CNT and Al/CNT. A winding loss reduction of about 56.2% was seen with CNT windings. Thus, it was concluded that the best possible core and winding combination was amorphous or nanocrystalline cores with CNT windings, as they give the lowest possible core and winding losses for the PT. Finite Element Analysis was carried out on a 2-kW PT operating at 100 kHz frequency, with the software Altair FLUX for the analysis.