A Novel Soft-Switching Full-Bridge PWM Converter with an Energy Recovery Circuit

This paper proposes a new phase-shift full-bridge DC-DC converter by applying energy recovery circuits to a conventional full-bridge DC-DC converter in plasma display panel applications. The converter can achieve soft-switching in main-switches by an extra auxiliary resonant network even with the wide operating condition of both output load and input voltage. The un-coupled design guidelines to the main bridge-leg component parameters for soft-switching operation contribute to conduction loss reduction in the transformer primary side leading to efficiency improvement. The auxiliary switches in the resonant network also operate in zero-current switching. This paper analyzes the operation modes of the proposed scheme and presents the key design guidelines through steady state analysis. Also, the paper verifies the validity of the circuits by hardware experiments with a 1 kW DC/DC converter prototype.