Soft-switching-interleaved power factor correction converter with lossless snubber

Abstract

This paper describes a soft-switching-interleaved power factor correction (PFC) converter. The proposed PFC converter reduces the input-current ripple by using an interleave-control method and realizes high efficiency through the soft-switching operation of all switching devices, without requiring a large auxiliary resonant circuit. In order to confirm that the proposed converter achieves soft-switching operation, a prototype of the PFC converter was experimentally investigated. The experimental results indicate that the proposed converter can realize soft-switching operation on all switching devices, reduce the amount of input current ripple, generate a unity input power factor of 99% or more, and maintain both a sinusoidal input current and a constant output-voltage control. The efficiency of the proposed PFC converter with a lossless snubber is higher than that of the PFC converter without the snubber. Moreover, an improvement technique for reducing the power-source current distortion is proposed. Improvement in the amount of source-current distortion is confirmed by using a waveform-improvement method in both the simulation and the experiment, reducing the total harmonic distortion (THD) by 2.74%.