Power Supply for Phased Array Radar
Phase I Navy Contract
Contract Period Q3 2003 - Q1 2004

Over the last two decades, efforts within the Navy and Ballistic Missile Defense communities have focused on the development of fully solid-state, phased array radars.

One critical area is the improvement of the power supplies that drive the T/R modules. Such a power supply must act as a highly regulated DC-DC converter, providing precise, low noise output voltage into the T/R module that behaves as an active, pulsed load. The supply must convert a rectified, unregulated DC source, at typical input voltages of 200 - 400 VDC, to output voltages of 8 - 50 VDC. Simultaneously, it must be easily integrated into the array design, supporting the overall array requirements for size, weight, and cooling. Building a simple DC-DC converter is relatively straightforward, but achieving the Navy's desired specifications of a power density of over 100 W/in³, efficiency over 90%, and a cost of less than $1 / W, presents a significant challenge in power supply design.

The key to meeting the Navy's objectives is improving converter efficiency. A typical commercial 1 kW power converter, operating at 80% efficiency, needs to remove 250 W of waste heat. To accomplish this, converter's heat sink occupies over 40% of the module volume. The additional infrastructure required to remove the heat from the heat sink can more than double the overall converter size and weight.

Achieving higher efficiency lessens the amount of power lost as heat within the converter, so the overall size and weight of the converter can be reduced significantly. For example, increasing the converter efficiency to 95% reduces the cooling load (and the supporting infrastructure) by a factor of more than four. If the electronics simply remained the same size, the overall converter density would go up by more than 30% through efficiency improvement alone.

In this SBIR, DTI developed and evaluated a new multi-phase buck regulator design that is substantially more efficient and reliable than either a transformer-coupled DC-DC converter, or a conventional buck regulator. It is based upon DTI high voltage buck regulator technology, demonstrated to be more than 95% efficient. Its use will reduce the converter's cooling requirements and enable the desired power densities. In addition, it can be built at power levels ranging from a few hundred watts to multi-MWs. Because there are no single points of failure within this design it has very high reliability at any power level.

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Phased array power supply.