Hardware design of a high-current, high step-down ratio Series Capacitor Buck converter prototype for slow-ramped powering of High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider inner triplet superconducting electromagnets

Abstract

In this work, the main hardware design aspects of a slow-ramped DC/DC power converter prototype, developed to feed superconducting inner triplet (IT) electromagnets for the High Luminosity (HL) upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is presented. The proposal comprises a two-quadrant multiphase interleaved converter, based on the Series Capacitor Buck architecture, which operates at very high-current and high step-down ratio conditions. A series of innovative solutions were investigated and developed in order to fulfill the challenging aspects such as waveform quality, power loss, volume and size. All these hardware aspects are thoroughly described in the manuscript. Finally, experimental results that demonstrate the validity of the proposal are presented, operating the converter close-to-nominal conditions during power delivery and energy recovery modes. Thus, this work provides valuable information that will help researchers and engineers alike to build these type of specialized converters for future upgrades of high-energy scientific particle accelerators.