Design of Customer-End Converter Systems for Low Voltage DC Distribution from a Life Cycle Cost Perspective

This paper presents an approach to power electronic converter design in which the objective is to minimize the life cycle cost when the converter is used to supply a residential customer. In the paper, the life cycle cost is defined as the sum of the cost of the main components of the power stage and the cost of the losses during the utilization period. The semiconductor switches, output filtering, heat sink, gate drivers, and DC link capacitance are included in the analysis, whereas their parameters are freed in the optimization process. The behavior of the load of an average residential customer is taken as one of the inputs in the calculation. It is shown that parameters such as the optimal silicon area, filter inductance, and switching frequency can differ significantly from the industry norm in which a high weight factor is given to the performance near the nominal power.