Modified current‐fed full‐bridge isolated power factor correction converter with low‐voltage stress

Abstract

One drawback of the conventional current-fed full-bridge (CFFB) power factor correction (PFC) converters is extremely high-voltage spikes on metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs), which cause many problems such as high-voltage high-cost devices used, unreliability and burdensome magnetising components imposed. To overcome above shortcomings, a new isolated CFFB PFC converter featuring efficiency improvement, high input current quality and good common mode (CM) noise performance is proposed in this study. The voltage spikes are effectively eliminated by using a non-dissipative clamping structure resulting of no-loss consumption and low-voltage MOSFETs used. Additionally, to evaluate the conducted electromagnetic interference behaviour, the differential mode loop and CM loop models are also presented. Two testing hardware systems with 180–240 V input, 380 V/1 kW output of the conventional CFFB PFC and proposed PFC were built and inspected to compare their performances. The experimental results showed that the proposed topology completely eliminated the voltage spike on MOSFETs. The efficiency was largely improved by utilising of high-performance MOSFETs. In consequence, the experimental results reveal the preponderance of the proposed PFC converter to the previous researches on this topic.