Ceramic material drastically shrinks power supplies
In particulary LEDs can benefit from the achievement: Their switching power supply typically is located separately from the LED light bulb. The ceramic material allows it to integrate the power supply into the heat sink of the luminaire.
This technology has been developed within the scope of the research programme ALFerMO by Siemens along with research partners from industry and science, Siemens said in a press release.
Many devices used in building and traffic control and automation as well as LED luminaires require electronic power supplies or drivers. Frequently these building blocks are rather space consuming, which prevents a compact system design. Particularly difficult to shrink are transformers with their magnetic ferrite core and metallic coils. With their properties they determine the extend to which an electronic building block such as an LED driver or a switching power supply can be shrunk.
Using 16 Osram Oslon LED luminaires as an example, the ALFerMo consortium demonstrated how to integrate the power supply into a recess of the heat sink. The researchers applied two tricks to shrink the transformer: The utilized a much higher switching frequency – the higher the frequency the smaller are the transformers needed. In addition they developed a layered structure consisting of magnetic ceramic films, which allowed integrating the ferrite core along with the transformer windings into a ceramic PCB. Thus it was possible to shrink the transformer size to one fifth of its original size and to integrate the driver circuitry into an LED heat sink with a diameter of 10 cm and a height of 5 cm.
The engineers and scientists in the ALFerMo project thus made progress in driving the integration PCBs for modular, compact power electronics assemblies. In addition, the consortium examined applications of this approach in the widely used epoxy PCB types as well as applications beyond lighting technology.
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