High Step-up Converter Associated with Soft-Switching Circuit with Partial Energy Processing for Livestock Stunning Applications

This paper presents a high step-up converter associated with a full-bridge inverter for livestock stunning applications. The proposed converter adopts a two stage converter and uses partial energy processing to reduce voltage stress and switching loss and then, its switches are operated in a complementary manner to reduce component counts and circuit structure complexity. To further improve its conversion efficiency, the proposed soft-switching converter is formed by introducing coupled inductors to the high step-up converter, which can achieve zero-voltage switching at turn-on transition. Compared with the conventional two-stage step-up converter and that with the switch integration, the proposed converter can improve conversion efficiency of 6~8% over that with two-stage hard switching under full load condition, and can reduce cost of that with the switch integration. In this research, the output voltage waveforms generated from the converter and inverter are with frequency varying from 50 Hz to 800 Hz, amplitude varying from zero to its breakdown voltage, as high as 200 V, and duty ratio changing from 0.3 to 0.7. Performance measurements from a prototype have verified the feasibility of the overall system design