The Problem: The energy consumption of telecommunications buildings and data centers has been rapidly increasing due to the widespread use of information and communication technology equipment. In a typical data center less than half of the power is delivered to the computing load and the rest of the power is lost in power conversion distribution and cooling. Therefore reduction in electricity consumption in the telecommunication and information industry is an important issue. Technology Solution: To address this issue researchers at the University of Tennessee have designed fabricated and tested a 7.5 kW liquid all-SiC three-phase buck rectifier for 400 Vdc architecture data center power supply systems. Wide band-gap devices are used in parallel to obtain low power losses. Input and output filters were designed to reduce passive component losses. A prototype of this rectifier was constructed and with 480 Vacrms line-to-line input voltage 400 V dc output voltage and resistor load was tested. The efficiency greater than 98.5% was obtained at full load and at 50C.
(1) Enable greater cost savings for data center operations as the rectifier reduces power device losses. (2) Reduced power semiconductor losses and passive components losses. (3) Efficiency greater than 98.5% for a 7.5kW buck rectifier at full load at 50C.