A ZCS Full-Bridge Converter Without Voltage Overstress on the Switches

A new current-driven soft-switched full-bridge converter is presented in this paper. By connecting a switched-capacitor snubber in parallel with the primary winding of the coupling transformer, all main switches are zero-current-switched (ZCS) and the switches in the snubber are zero-voltage-switched (ZVS). The proposed converter has the following key features. First, the transformer leakage inductance is utilized as a part of the resonant circuit for the soft-switching actions. Second, the snubber capacitor voltage is adaptively controlled: the capacitor is charged to the minimum necessary energy for switching the main switches at zero current, depending on the actual value of the input/load current. Thus, less resonant energy is circulated. Third, there is no extra voltage stress on the switches and the current through the switches is limited to the value of the input current. Consequently, the conduction losses are kept minimum. The cyclical switching operation and control of the converter are described. A tradeoff design of the snubber circuit is given: the requirement of reducing the duration of the resonant intervals for minimizing the duty-cycle loss is superimposed on the requirement of getting ZCS for a very large range of the line voltage and load. A 530-V/15-kV, 5-kW prototype has been built and evaluated. The experimental results confirmed the theoretical predictions. A comparative study on the converter efficiency with and without the proposed snubber circuit is given, showing the superiority of the proposed solution.