Design methodology of an interleaved buck converter for onboard automotive application, multi-objective optimisation under multi-physic constraints

This study presents a design methodology applied to design and improve the efficiency of interleaved Buck converters. This methodology is based on a multi-physic and multi-objective optimisation to ensure well integration of the converters. Thereto, the number of cells is used as a key parameter to formalise this approach with analytical models established to offer compromise needed between the computation time and results accuracy. The proposed methodology is applied to an interleaved buck converter for automotive application to achieve the requirements as electrical, volume, efficiency and thermal constraints. It allows to find the optimal converter architecture by searching the minimum volume integration and maximum efficiency by depicting the optimal number of cells and adequate active and passive component technologies selected from a manufacturer database. This methodology is drawn up to remove the risk of feasibility on the converter configuration earlier during the design process considering multi-physic constraints.