5kW Weinberg Converter for Battery Discharging in High-Power Communication Satellites

Abstract

To be competitive on the telecommunication commercial satellites market, the electrical power subsystems have to be more easily adaptable to the output power level and to the payloads specifications. A trend in recent years has been a steady increase of the payload power of telecommunication spacecraft. The communication satellites of the next generation will increase their capacity of power thus to be able to still lodge more payload on their platform. The powers that will be reached in the next years are above 25 kW. This has manifold implications. Among them we emphasized that it is not possible to use the used constituent modules at the present time whose power is of 1 kW or 2 kW, since up to 25 modules would be needed. To reduce the burden of the thermal control and to utilize more efficiently the power sources, solar arrays and batteries, higher bus voltage have been introduced also in order to reduce the circulating currents. In this paper we present an overall design and experimental results of a high-efficiency non-isolated 5 kW Weinberg converter with conductance control working as a battery discharge regulator module