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Variable Voltage Converter (VVC) is adopted in Power-Split structure of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) to optimize the Electric-Drive (e-Drive) system performance. With the wider availability of Silicon Carbide (SiC) power semiconductor for automotive applications, there are new opportunities to further optimize and improve performance of VVC, e.g. lower power loss, smaller size, and lighter weight, comparing to use traditional Silicon (Si) IGBT and diode. In this paper, a SiC based VVC is designed, prototyped, and evaluated. In order to maximize the benefits of SiC power devices in VVC application, each key component is carefully designed and selected, including SiC power module, power capacitor, and power inductor. The characterization and evaluation results demonstrate the benefits of advanced SiC devices in VVC design optimization, and such benefits quantified in this paper.

Boost converter is widely applied to hybrid electric vehicles (HEV). Typical control methods employ two proportional-integral (PI) regulators to fulfill DC bus voltage closed-loop control and inductor current closed-loop control, respectively. They have intrinsic performance limitations: 1) slow dynamic response of DC bus voltage regulation; 2) high overshoot voltage during transient state; 3) it is difficult to design four gains best fit all operational conditions. This paper proposes a model prediction based boost converter control method for HEV applications. The proposed control method employs model based instantaneous power prediction and dynamic optimization in real time by minimizing a defined cost function to overcome above issues. First of all, the issues of typical control methods are analyzed. Then, the proposed control method is presented in detail, followed by simulation verification and comparison with PI based control method.