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Additive Manufacturing of Toroid Inductors for Power Electronics Applications
Year: 2017 | Author: Yi Yan | Paper: D1.8
Fig. 1. (a) Typical power supply consisting of a number of discrete magnetic components; (b) Basic process for making the windings of inductors and transformers; and (c) Integrated uniform-flux inductor design
Additive manufacturing (AM) or three-dimensional (3D) printing is a layer-by-layer process of making products and components from a digital model. Some key benefits of AM are shorter lead times, mass customization, reduced part count, ability to manufacture more complex shapes, less material waste, and lower life-cycle energy use. Recently, some research groups have explored the application of AM in power electronics. The purpose of this work is to explore the feasibility of using a 3D-printing process for fabricating magnetic components that consist of both magnetic cores and conductive windings. We chose to work with a multi-material extrusion-based 3D printer because it offers the ease and flexibility of co-processing multiple materials, and for feedstock we can leverage our research expertise in the formulation of pastes of metal and magnetic + poly-mer composites. Use of paste as the feedstock also reduces material waste, lowers the equipment cost, and simplifies the part construction process. The paste-based additive process can be readily scaled up to manufacture a multi-material and multi-functional system. Thus, this process platform offers the potential for further integration of a power electronics circuit by concurrent manufacturing of capacitive, magnetic, and resistive components.
Fig. 2. Multi-extruder paste-extrusion 3D printer.
