An active-clamp push-pull converter for battery sourcing applications

This paper presents an active-clamp push-pull converter for battery sourcing applications. A pair of auxiliary switches, resonant inductors and clamping capacitors are added to the primary-side of the transformer to clamp voltage spike and recycle the energy trapped in the leakage inductors. In the proposed active-clamp push-pull converter, since both main and auxiliary switches can be turned on with zero-voltage switching, switching loss can be reduced and conversion efficiency therefore can be improved significantly. Furthermore, the proposed converter can eliminate potential flux-imbalance problems existing in the conventional push-pull converter. In this study, a 1 kW active-clamp push-pull converter was implemented, from which experimental results have shown that efficiency improvement and surge suppression can be achieved effectively. It is relatively feasible for applications to battery sourcing converters