10th International Conference on Power Electronics-ECCE Asia
May 27 - 30, 2019 / BEXCO, Busan, Korea
Design of a Medium Frequency Transformer with
High Insulation Level for Dual Active Bridge
DC-DC Converter
Tianzhu Tang1 , J.A.Ferreira2 , Saijun Mao3 , Wenbo Wang4 and M.Ghaffarian Niasar5
1,4 Bejing Delft Institute of Intelligent Science and Technology, China
2,5 Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
3 Leadrive Technology (Shanghai) Co.Ltd., China
Abstract—This paper presents a medium frequency trans-
former with high insulation level design which is used for the DAB
DC-DC converter. The transformer size is largely reduced when
operating at medium frequency compared with conventional
power frequency transformer which provides the possibility for
higher power density. However, there is a trade-off between
the high power density and thermal performance. First of all,
the exposed cooling surface is reduced accordingly. And the
dissipated heat is proportional to the exposed cooling surface
directly. Secondly with higher frequencies, effects such as skin
and proximity and hysteresis losses are significantly increased
compared to transformer operation at 50/60 Hz. Besides the
design process should consider high isolation requirement. And
this again defects the transformer thermal performance and this
is because firstly insulation material adds extra losses to the
system, secondly the construction of the insulation will block some
cooling surfaces and thirdly those insulation materials normally
have relatively low thermal conductivity. As a consequence, the
thermal design should be carefully considered and evaluated.
To solve this problem, only the high voltage side winding is
impregnated in epoxy resin which reduces the insulation material.
The stacked transformer cores are gapped from each other which
have helped the transformer heat dissipation. Such that, a design
with low thermal resistance and high power density is achieved.
FEM models are developed to analyze the transformer electric
and thermal performances. Finally prototypes are built and tested
to verify our design concept.
Index Terms—High voltage, medium frequency transformer,
thermal analysis, isolation design
I. I NTRODUCTION
Most recent research on power electronics have been fo-
cused on the power converter system because of the rapid de-
velopment of smart grid, traction drive system and distributed
renewable energy generation [1].
The state of art power conversion systems mainly employ
line frequency (50 Hz) transformers to ensure galvanic isola-
tion between the power supply and the load. In recent years,
solid state transformer (SST) is one of the main research topics
in the area of power electronics as it comprises all types of
power conversion required in energy supply [2]. Besides, the
SST uses a medium frequency power transformer to replace
the traditional line frequency power transformer thus reducing
the size and the weight of the passive components. However,
as the frequency is increased, various effects such as skin,
ⓒ2019 KIPE 523
proximity and hysteresis losses cannot be neglected. Hence,
the loss density is increased, and the heat dissipation must
be carefully considered. Besides the high voltage isolation
requirement must also be satisfied. Materials like transformer
oil and insulating gas are the dielectric of choice for high
voltage and high power transformer applications. They not
only offer great insulating properties, but also aid heat trans-
portation under either natural or forced convection conditions.
However, in reality gas or oil filled transformer often has
leaking problems. Also, extra effort is needed to maintain
the purity of the oil as various impurities cause localized
discharge [3].The cast resin dry-type is more attractive than
oil or gas filled power transformer giving the more compact
design and reduction of maintenance, simple installation and
have no problems associated with leaking fluid.
Current power frequency high voltage cast resin dry type
transformers (ABB Resibloc and Siemens Geafol) insulation
configuration are usually made of air and solid material that
are able to achieve the desired isolation level. The high voltage
side windings (hollow cylinder shape) are resin-casted in
vacuum. This encapsulation protects the transformer from dirt,
dust, moisture, and other contaminants. However, the insula-
tion material is inherently bad thermal conductor, necessitating
forced air cooling to help with the heat dissipation. Also, a
large air gap dielectric distance is required between primary
and secondary winding.
This paper proposes a novel medium frequency power
transformer with high voltage isolation requirement design
which adopts similar insulation design concept with reduced
the air dielectric distance between primary and secondary
windings. Besides the multiple gapped cores are stacked with
each other to increase the core cooling surface. Additionally
air forced cooling is used to enhance the transformer heat
dissipation.
This paper has the following structure. The first part in-
troduce background of the transformer and design specifica-
tions. The transformer design process is described next. The
transformer insulation and thermal performance are carefully
considered during the design process. Prototype testing results
are given then. Finally, conclusions are drawn.
A. Background
(V1 + V2 )D
The transformer application background is given in this Ipeak = (2)
4L1 f
section. And it will help the reader to understand how the r
transformer design specifications are derived starting from the 2
system operation conditions. Irms = Ipeak 1−D (3)
3
The requirements for the transformer design are given in
Table I.

TABLE I
T RANSFORMER OPERATION CONDITIONS AND REQUIREMENTS

Frequency f 20 kHz
Square wave volatge 720 V
Turn ratio 1:1
RMS current 98 A
Peak current 103 A
DC insulation stress 10 kV
AC insulation stress ± 720 V
Size <320 mm × 190 mm × 245 mm

Fig. 1. Proposed medium voltage AC to low voltage AC converter

II. M EDIUM FREQUENCY TRANSFORMER DESIGN
A. Introduction
The transformer is the most important component in the
DC-DC converter which provides isolation and voltage match.
As the switch frequency increasing, the transformer losses
including core and copper losses significantly influence the
transformer efficiency and thermal performance.
Besides the reduced transformer size limits the conduction
and convection of the transformer heat. The thermal challenge
is a consequence of the previous two reasons. A designer of
Fig. 2. DAB topology high frequency high power transformer with high insulation
level faces the challenges of thermal management, and insu-
1) Application: The target application is a modular, multi- lation coordinate.
level converter system shown in Figure 1. The to be designed Accurate transformer losses estimation always plays an
transformer is applied in modular multilevel converter system. important role in converter design and optimization.
The system consists of three stages (AC to DC, DC to DC
and DC to AC). Each DC-DC converter is essentially a dual B. Transformer Construction Determination
active bridge (DAB) converter module and they are connected
in series at the input and in parallel at the output. The input
DC bus voltage of this multi-level DC-DC stage is 10 kV,
the output DC bus voltage is 380 V. The DAB converter can
be controlled using many methods as in [1] which gives a
thorough introduction on DAB operation, design and control.
The magnitude and direction of the power flow Pav in single
DAB modular can be changed by adjusting D which is the
phase shift between primary and secondary AC square wave
voltage Vh1 and Vh2 :

V1 V2 D(1 − D)
Pav =
2L1 f
Where L1 is the series connected inductance in Figure 2.
2) Transformer design specifications: The transformer is
designed based on the rated operation. The insulation level of
the transformer should satisfy the worst scenario.
Since in this design V1 =V2 , the peak current Ipeak and
RMS current Irms can be calculated as
(1) Fig. 3. Typical core and shell type transformer constructions
The transformer constructions can be divided into two kinds
in generally, core type and shell type (shown Figure 3 ). One
of the major difference between the core type and the shell
type transformers is that in core type transformer, the winding
encircles the core, whereas, in shell type transformer, the core
encircles the winding of the transformer.

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 The core type transformer can dissipated winding heat
quicker since the windings are located external to the core and
exposed to the ambient. Additionally, core type transformer is
ideal for applications that requires a high window utilization
[4].
Instead of winding arrangement used in most power fre-
quency dry type transformer [5], sectionalized windings de-
picted in Figure 4 are applied in this design. The gap between
primary and secondary windings plays as the dielectric dis-
tance which makes the design more compact. Both primary
and secondary windings are divided into two bundles and
wound on two core legs separately employing concentric wind-
ings. The bundles are connected in parallel at the terminal. To
guarantee the isolation capability between primary winding
and other parts of the transformer. The primary winding
conductors together with the bobbins are embedded in cast
resin.
Fig. 4. Cross section of the transformer
The litz wire is used since it enables low resistance at
medium frequency. It is possible to apply the litz wire design
more effectively. However, in this design the litz wire strand of
0.1 mm is chosen as it is most available on the market besides
this diameter is far smaller than the effective skin depth (which
can be calculated as in [6]). For simplicity, the litz wire DC
resistance is taken to calculate the winding losses during the
modeling and analysis phase. The litz wire strands number are
determined by the rms currrent density. In this case, the rms
current density is around 1 A/mm2 .
The core is split into multiple cores with gaps inserted
between each other (exhibited in Figure5). The core pre-
sented in the figure 4 surfaces are exposed to the ambient
completely allowing further enhance the transformers thermal
performance.
C. Core Material Selection and Core Losses Modelling
The combination of high electrical resistivity and useful
magnetic properties has caused ferrites become increasingly
important as medium frequency core materials [7]. However, it
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Fig. 5. Core arrangement
has limited saturation flux density compared with silicon steels
and amorphous. When determining the core number Nc and
winding turns Nw , the maximum core flux density Bmax has
put the biggest constraint. Bmax mustn’t beyond the saturation
flux density of the chosen ferrites material.
V1
Bmax = (4)
4Nw Nc f Ae
where Ae is the effective area of the core geometry.
Steinmetz equation is the most simple and straight core
losses calculation method. The Steinmetz equations is derived
by curve-fitting the measured data under sinusoidal excitation.
Manufacturers often provide core loss density under sinusoidal
voltage excitation under different frequencies and flux den-
sities. For the square voltage waveforms whose duty cycle
is 50%, the waveform-coefficient Steinmetz equation can be
used. This method assumes that the core loss is related to
the integration of flux density. For a sinusoidal and triangle
waveform with the same peak flux density and frequency, the
core loss density of those two equals to ratio of flux density
integration [8]. Therefore the Waveform-coefficient Steinmetz
equation (WcSE) of the rectangle waveform voltage can be
defined as
Pv = F W C · Kf α Bmax
β
(5)
Where F W C is the waveform factor and it equals to π
f is
4,
the operation frequency in Hz and Bmax is the maximum flux
density in T. K, α and β are constants. The core losses density
is in (kW/m3 ). The standard ferrite (material H40) U core from
Hengchuang is used. All the parameters are provided from the
manufacture.
D. Insulation Design
The transformer insulation system must guarantee sufficient
electric strength. Four types of insulation requirements should
be satisfied in this case, namely the wire to wire insulation,
the primary winding to core insulation, the primary winding to
secondary winding insulation, the secondary winding to core
insulation.
Since the core is grounded, the insulation between the
primary winding and the secondary winding plus the trans-
former core should all be designed based on the 10kV
insulation requirement. The insulation level between secondary
winding and the core should be set as 720 V. Furthermore,
the maximum wire to wire withstand voltage Vws depends
on the winding configuration. Each winding consists of two
coils connected in parallel. Each coil has two layers using
the sandwich winding method. The side view of the winding
structure is shown in Figure 6.
The method to calculate Vws and maximum electric field has
been introduced in [9]. Comparison between different winding
configurations has also been investigated in [9]. It shows that
such winding method can reduce the voltage stress. Besides
this winding configuration brings convenience to adjust the
integrated inductance values compared with concentric wind-
ings.
Fig. 6. Transformer winding terminals
During the manufacture process, windings are wound on the
bobbin (Figure7). Ployimide films are wound on top of the litz
wire winding surface to ensure the inner winding insulation.
The bobbin are put together by several FR4 pieces. And
they are glued to each other using thermally conductive and
electrically insulating grease. The high voltage side winding
is merged into a high voltage cable tube at the terminal. The
primary winding is then impregnated in the BPA based epoxy
resin and the part of the cable is also immersed in the resin.
The completely impregnated primary windings are shown in
Figure8.
Fig. 7. Bobbin made of FR4 pieces and glued together using grease
The insulating material properties are listed in Table II.
According to the IEEE Std. C57.12.01 standard, the trans-
former needed to pass the dielectric withstand voltage test and
fulfill the partial discharge requirement. The 50 Hz withstand
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Fig. 8. impregnated primary winding with high voltage cable at the terminal
TABLE II
I NSULATING MATERIAL PROPERTY
Material Dielectric Dielectric Thermal
strength constant conductivity
FR4 30 kV/mm 5.5 0.25 W/mK
Resin 16 kV/mm 3 0.8 W/mK
Polymide film 102 kV/mm 3 0.1 W/mK
peak testing voltage should be 42 kV. It is assumed that
the epoxy resin alone should handle this insulating voltage.
Bobbin is mainly used to support the windings. The thickness
of the resin is calculated through
Vins
dins = (6)
γEins
where Eins is the dielectric strength of the insulation material
and Vins is the voltage required to be insulated. γ is is taken
as 0.15 according to manufacture experience and using as a
safe margin parameter [10].
The electrical field is highly stressed in the air gap between
the primary winding and the core. This phenomena has been
simulated in Figure 9. To eliminate the air gap electric stress
and satisfy the high power density requirement, copper can be
plated on the surface of the resin and grounded. By doing so,
the electric field is constraint within the resin.
Another issue needs to be further considered is that there
should be enough creepage distance from the primary winding
terminal to the core and secondary winding to prevent the
surface tracking. Therefore we propose an extended resin
block at the primary winding terminal. Figure 10 and this will
bring convenience during the resin manuafcture. The concept
is shown in Figure 10.
The design is evaluated in Figure 11 using a 2D FEM elec-
trostatic analysis. As can be observed, after the modification
the electrical field between the primary winding and secondary
winding plus the core is within acceptable value.
E. Thermal Modelling
The power losses in the core material and windings are
increasing with increasing frequency, leading to an increased
temperature rise in transformer. Besides the presence of in-
sulation media, thermal management would be a challenge
for transformer design. It is therefore necessary to include a
 order to achieve high power density, forced air cooling method
is used. The heat generated inside the core is transfer to the
core surface and the heat is then extracted by the forced air
cooling to the ambient.
The core numbers and winding turns combination are cho-
sen when the total losses is minimum. Besides the transformer
size meets the requirement and core window has enough space
to filled in the windings.
The core and winding thermal performance are analyzed
separately using simplified FEM programs. Assumptions using
during the simulation are listed below:
1) All the material property is isotropic.
2) Only the heat conduction and conviction are considered.
Assuming all the exposed surfaces are given uniform air
flow. The heat conviction is set as 10 W/m2 K. The ambient
temperature is set as 298.16 K.
Fig. 9. Electric field is highly stressed over the gap 3) The winding cross section is uniformly distributed along
the length. The secondary winding is exposed to the air
directly. The insulation layer of the litz wire is neglected.
4) The core losses and winding losses are calculated from
previous analytical methods. And these losses are generated
uniformly within the material.
Table III lists all the materials properties used for the FEM
modelling.

TABLE III
M ATERIAL PROPERTIES USED FOR THERMAL MODELING

Fig. 10. Extended primary winding cast resin to increase the creepage distance Material Ferrite Copper Expoxy cats resin FR4
from high voltage side windings to the rest of the system Density kg/m3 8900 8900 1360 1900
Thermal conductivity 0.8 385 0.8 0.3
W/mK
thermal model of the transformer to ensure that the operating Specific heat J/g ◦ C 750 387 1000 1369
temperature is kept within safe margins.
The principle of the transformer construction is to use
several pairs of U cores and place them in a row with gaps
between each other. The winding encapsulations are arranged
in a way that there is enough space between the winding and
the core. And the air is free to flow through. All the surfaces of
the core are exposed to the ambient. We can also assume that
the core and windings are thermal insulated from each other. In

Fig. 12. 3D core internal temperature FEM modeling results

The simplified 2D FEM winding temperature distribution

result is shown in Figure 13. The center of primary winding
center leg is the hottest spot which is 64K warmer than the
ambient, 15K warmer than the its surface. The center of outer
leg of the primary winding is 50K warmer than the ambient
and 10K warmer than the surface. The temperature of the
Fig. 11. Electric field and potential distribution of the primary winding secondary winding is uniform distributed and 32K warmer
terminal than the ambient.

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 Fig. 15. Prototype B: Medium frequency transformer with primary winding
impregnated in resin
Fig. 13. 2D winding temperature FEM modeling results

B. Thermal Test on Protype A

It can conclude that the core will have the highest tempera-
ture. The hot spot temperature of the winding and core don’t
differ a lot from their surface temperature.
III. P ROTOTYPE AND E XPERIMENTAL T ESTING
A. Prototype
Two transformer prototype have been built (shown in Fig-
ure 14 and Figure 15), the only difference is that Prototype A
in Figure 14 has not had its primary winding impregnated with
epoxy resin. However, semi-conductor or copper plating on the
cast resin surface has not been implemented on Prototype B
due to limited time. For both cases, the series inductance is
inherently integrated as leakage inductance of the transformer.
The vertical distance between these two windings is adjusted
to achieve the required leakage inductance.

Fig. 16. The test setup for thermal testing

Two sets of thermal tests have been performed on the

transformer Prototype A.The test setup referring to the circuit
configuration is demonstrated in Figure 16. Two test points
(shown in Figure 16) are chosen representing the core and
winding temperatures. TP100 thermocouples attached to the
test points are used to measure the temperature changes.

Fig. 14. Prototype A: Medium frequency transformer without cast resin

Thermal tests have been conducted on both prototypes. The

thermal running testing circuit resembles the circuit used in
[11]. In this circuit, the output power is regenerated back to
the input terminals after the DC supply. In this experiment,
transformer primary and secondary voltages are measured by
ocsilloscope. The transformer primary and secondary winding
current are detected by current probe. The power flowing in
the transformer can be calculated from the measured current Fig. 17. Full load forced cooling test on Prototype A
and voltage.

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Fig. 18. Thermal equilibrium of Prototype A under full load forced cooling
test conditions
The first set experiment is conducted on the Prototype
A under forced cooling condition at full load. The cooling
conditions during the test resembles the practical working
conditions. The results are recorded in the Figure 17. From the
result, we know that the core and winding start from the same
temperatures. With the accumulation of heat, the temperature
difference becomes more significant. After 20 minutes, the
thermal equilibrium is achieved, the temperature difference is
kept at 20 ◦ C. The thermal equilibrium temperature distribu-
tion is captured with thermal imaging in Figure 18.
Fig. 19. Natural cooling test on Prototype A
Since, prototype A has survived the forced cooling condi-
tions, it is then decided to investigate its performance under
natural cooling conditions. Thus prototype A is assessed again
under natural cooling condition. The results are recorded in
Figure 18. The test starts from the 3/4 loading. This opera-
tion condition is obtained approximately when the measured
primary rms current is 3/4 of the rated rms current value.
Next, the transformer is changed to full load. There is a
clear trend that winding temperature rise increased since the
current flowing in the winding increases. The core temperature
increase steadily resembling the previous trend which is not
affected by the increase of the current. At the end of the test,
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both the winding and core temperatures are still rising at a
constant speed.
Compare these two experiments, we can conclude that the
combination of forced cooling and extra exposure surface areas
has enhanced the transformer thermal performance to a large
degree.
C. Thermal Test on Protype B
The full load forced cooling testing have been also per-
formed on Figure 16. PT100 thermocouple is buried inside
the resin to measure the primary winding temperature. Ob-
servations and conclusions draw from the experiments are
summarized:
The core temperature achieved 150 ◦ C under full load
at thermal equilibrium. After taking off the copper strip on
the core which acts as the core fixture, the equilibrate core
temperature decreases to 130 ◦ C. The primary winding
temperatures at forced and natural cooling testing conditions
are around 119 ◦ C.
Combine the prototype thermal experiment results and com-
pare the results with previous thermal model, we can conclude
that
1) forced cooling is necessary and only the combination
of forced air cooling and more exposure surface will largely
improve the thermal performance.
2) the thermal performance of prototype B is still not ideal.
The core thermal performance can be improved by either
reduce the maximum flux density or reduce the eddy current
losses caused by copper strips. The forced-air cooling has
limited effects on the impregnated winding cooling. To further
improve the thermal performance, we could either decrease
the current density or using resin material with larger thermal
conductivity.
3) the simplified thermal model could be used to indicate
temperature distribution in general, however the model is not
accurate enough.
D. Insulation Test
Another test is set out to determine the prototype B insula-
tion capability. According to IEEE Std.C57.12.01, to reach the
desired insulation level the applied testing peak 50Hz voltage
should be at least 42 kV.
Primary Secondary
42 kV
50 Hz
Fig. 20. Insultaion test circuit diagram
During the test, the primary coil is connect with a 42 kV rms
50Hz power source. The core and secondary coil are grounded.
In the initial few tests, because the grounded copper layer are
not put on the resin surface. Electrical discharges have been
observed between high voltage winding and the core. After [10] G. Ortiz, J. Biela, and J. W. Kolar, “Optimized design of medium
the copper is simply glued on the resin surface. the sparking frequency transformers with high isolation requirements,” in IECON
2010-36th Annual Conference on IEEE Industrial Electronics Society.
between the impregnated primary winding and the core is IEEE, 2010, pp. 631–638.
eliminated. The tracking between primary winding terminal [11] S. Inoue and H. Akagi, “A bidirectional isolated dc–dc converter as a
and the core is erased when the extended block is added. core circuit of the next-generation medium-voltage power conversion
system,” IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, vol. 22, no. 2, pp.
After enhancing the terminal insulation and grounding the 535–542, 2007.
resin surface using copper foil, the transformer passes the one
minute test successfully.
IV. C ONCLUSION AND N EXT S TEPS
This project was undertaken to design a medium frequency
transformer used for DAB DC-DC converter. Three important
issues should be taken into account for the transformer design:
the total losses, the insulation requirement and heat dissipation.
The losses are minimized by using ferrite and lizt wire. In
order to meet the insulation requirements, a novel insulation
structure is proposed. The primary winding is impregnated
in cast epoxy resin and especially enhanced at the terminal.
The thermal challenge is tackled through choosing the right
transformer construction types, besides gaps inserted into the
stacked cores combined with the forced cooling improves the
heat dissipation.
The results of the prototype experiments show that the pro-
posed transformer fulfilled the insulation requirement. How-
ever, the thermal performance should be further enhanced and
lower core temperature must be achieved. This can be done by
reducing the copper fixture eddy current effect and reduce the
operating flux density. Finally, a practical method to ground
the resin surface should be proposed and implemented.
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