Using a tapped inductor for reducing conduction losses in a soft-switching PWM DC-DC converter

An improved soft switching PWM full-bridge DC-DC power converter is presented. This employs a tapped inductor as a low-pass filter to minimize the circulating current flowing through the transformer and switching devices. By using the tapped inductor and a saturable reactor(s), the power converter achieves soft switching with both low commutating and low circulating currents resulting in low switching and conduction losses. The effective performance of the converter is experimentally confirmed with a 100 kHz-500 W breadboard