Panasonic Intellectual Property Management Co., Ltd.

Takeshi Nakayashiki

Hideki Tanaka

An in-vehicle power supply system includes a high-voltage direct-current (DC) power supply, a low-voltage storage battery, a DC-DC converter, and a controller. The DC-DC converter includes a conversion circuit including a high-voltage terminal and a low-voltage terminal, an input switch connected between the high-voltage DC power supply and the high-voltage terminal, and an output switch connected between the low-voltage terminal and the low-voltage storage battery. The controller is configured to, after detecting that a current flowing through the conversion circuit exceeds a predetermined current threshold or that a charge voltage of the low-voltage storage battery exceeds a predetermined voltage threshold, execute a failure determination of the DC-DC converter after instructing the conversion circuit to stop a voltage conversion operation, causing the input switch to switch to the disconnected state, and instructing the output switch to switch to the disconnected state. The controller is configured to, in the failure determination execute a first determination operation including an output short-circuit failure determination, an output open-circuit failure determination, and an input short-circuit failure determination. If determining, in the first determination operation, that the output switch does not have failure, controller is configured to execute a second determination operation of determining whether or not the conversion circuit has failure. If determining, in the second determination operation, that the conversion circuit does not have failure, the controller is configured to execute a third determination operation of determining whether or not the input switch has failure. The in-vehicle power supply device determines the location of failure easily.

In-vehicle power supply system to detect failure for a bi-directional DC-DC converter's conversion circuit

A polyphase power-supply device includes first to N-th DC-DC converters connected in parallel to each other between an input terminal and an output terminal and a switching controller configured to perform interleave control on the first to N-th DC-DC converters by supplying first to N-th pulse width modulation (PWM) signals to the first to N-th DC-DC converters, respectively, where N is any integer equal to or greater than two. A switching frequency of the first PWM signal is changed at a change time point at which a cycle of the first PWM signal starts. A length of a cycle of the k-th PWM signal firstly appearing after the change time point is shorter than lengths of subsequent cycles of the k-th PWM signal appearing the first cycle of the k-th PWM signal. This polyphase power-supply device has high reliability.

Growing community of inventors

Osaka, Japan

Takeshi Nakayashiki