Design of converters for leveraging 48V DC power line at homes / offices

There has been enough traction in India to standardize 48V DC home / Office wiring for power, an ideal solution for running office devices and energy storages seeking to provide better efficiency and performance. In addition, since most renewable sources provide direct current (DC) power and the batteries used for storing power also give DC power, it is easier to integrate these sources into DC power line. The 48V DC power is stepped down to lower DC voltages (12–36V) with the help of converters to power the office and storage devices. Once 48V DC is primary wiring, one would require converters to power lower voltage appliances like PCs (which take 19V) and laptops and also TVs (some of them take 12V). Besides once in a while one may have to connect some legacy equipment which takes only AC input. The objective of this paper is to design an efficient and cost effective DC-DC power converter for notebook computers. The converter employs a synchronous rectified step-down DC/DC converter IC BD9611MUV to yield 19.5V DC from 48V DC input. The performance of developed power converter has been investigated under different input conditions and practical results have been reported in this paper. Also, this paper shows that existing large AC appliances can be connected to 48V DC line with the help of Microinverter.