Abstract
This paper presents a regenerative passive snubber circuit for pulse-width modulation (PWM) inverters to achieve soft-switching purposes without significant cost and reliability penalties. This passive soft-switching snubber (PSSS) employs a diode/capacitor snubber circuit for each switching device in an inverter to provide low dv/dt and low switching losses to the device. The PSSS further uses a transformer-based energy regenerative circuit to recover the energy captured in the snubber capacitors. All components in the PSSS circuit are passive, thus leading to reliable and low-cost advantages over those soft-switching schemes relying on additional active switches. The snubber has been incorporated into a 150 kVA PWM inverter. Simulation and experimental results are given to demonstrate the validity and features of the snubber circuit.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 363-370 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 2004 |
Funding
Dr. Tolbert received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the 2001 IEEE Industry Applications Society Outstanding Young Member Award. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE POWER ELECTRONICS LETTERS and a Registered Professional Engineer in the state of Tennessee. Manuscript received May 3, 2002; revised October 13, 2003. This paper was presented at the Power Electronic Specialists Conference (PESC’02), Cairns Australia, June 23–27, 2002. This work was supported by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, UT-Battelle, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC05-00OR22725. Recommended by Associate Editor F. Blaabjerg.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| National Science Foundation | |
| U.S. Department of Energy | DE-AC05-00OR22725 |
| Oak Ridge National Laboratory | |
| UT-Battelle |
Keywords
- EMI
- PSSS
- PWM
- Soft switching inverters