A lossless switching technique for smart grid applications

Smart grid is an upgrade of the existing electricity infrastructure in which integration of non conventional energy sources are an integral part. This leads to the introduction of harmonics and increased switching losses in the system. Thus there is a need of loss less switching techniques for smart grid applications. Switched mode power supplies (SMPSs) are being extensively used in most power processes [1]. Developments were carried out centered on hard switched converters, where switching frequency is limited to 10 s of kHz [2]. The uses of soft switching techniques, [3-6] zero voltage switching (ZVS) or zero current switching (ZCS), is an attempt to substantially reduce the switching losses and hence attain high efficiency at increased switching frequency. The soft-switching topologies belong to families namely resonant load converters [3], resonant switch converters [2,4], resonant transition converters [5,6], and most recently active clamped PWM converters [7-9]. The active clamp topology adds an active clamp network, consisting of a small auxiliary switch in series with a capacitance plus the associated drive circuitry to the traditional hard switch converters. The proposed paper basically deals with the design, modeling and simulation of a ZVS PWM active clamp/reset forward converter having features like zero switching power losses, constant frequency and PWM operation, Soft-switching for all devices and Low voltage stresses on active devices due to clamping action. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.