The paper presents a novel approach to efficiency optimization applied to modular DC/DC converters. It consists of using several identical converters in parallel, turning on just as many of them as needed and operating them with maximum efficiency, while leaving only one of them working in a suboptimal operating point. The conditions for switching on or off a converter are also investigated to obtain maximum overall efficiency. Notable improvement can be obtained in the entire load region, especially at light load.Index Terms-efficiency, paralleled DC/DC converters, intelligent agents.
I. INTRODUCTIONToday society is aware of the importance of energy saving, yet consumes increasing amounts of energy. Numerous solutions have been devised to curb this growth. Efficiency of nearly unity are becoming a reality in industrial scale applications in electric energy conversion and the lower ends of the power range are following suit, albeit with some delay.DC/DC converters operate at inferior efficiencies at light load. The degradation of efficiency can be significant. Several methods have been proposed to overcome this problem [7].In the current paper another approach is presented, consisting of several identical converters connected in parallel at their outputs. While a number of them operates at their maximum efficiency, only one carries a lighter or heavier load. Having the converters operating on their optimum efficiency, the more converters are in parallel, the better the overall efficiency of the system is. Maximizing this aggregated efficiency is investigated in this paper and the optimum condition in terms of load distribution for switching on or off a converter is discussed.The structure of the paper is as follows: Section II offers a short review of the main aspects the state of the art with emphasis on the factors that influence the pricing of the converters; Section III deals with the implementation of the system with special focus on the control; Section IV is dedicated to demonstrating mathematically the superiority of the proposed approach compared to equal current sharing methods; in Section V simulation results to support the theoretical demonstration are presented; finally, Section VI concludes the paper.