Optimal and multi-physic design of inductors-transformer associated to railway application
Nowadays, power converters in railway domain are more and more compact and powerful. This progress is due to the use of fast efficient components, working at high frequency like IGBT. But this evolution generates many harmonics losses in different components as inductors or transformers, and complicates their design. In addition, for the design stage, acoustics comfort is an increasingly important factor. Hence, it is necessary to develop multi-physic models in order to integrate different phenomena as the PWM effects, the temperature, and the noise. These models are coupled to an optimization tool in order to define the design rules of passive components: inductors or transformers coupled with inductor for the railway applicationIt’s necessary to develop fast models with a good compromise between the accuracy of field calculations. In this thesis, only transformers and inductors with an air forced cooling are studied. A 3D thermal model based on a nodal network linked to electromagnetic model is used. In order to optimize this structure, NSGA-II algorithm is chosen. Some global optimizations, with respect to several objectives (weight and losses), including thermal constraint are finally presented. Experimental design method is applied to know how these response functions behave in the neighborhood of the optimal point