Analysis of Hybrid Converter with Wide Voltage Range Operation

A soft switching converter with wide voltage range operation is investigated in this paper. A series resonant converter is implemented to achieve a high circuit efficiency with soft switching characteristics on power switches and rectifier diodes. To improve the weakness of the narrow voltage range in LLC converters, an alternating current (ac) power switch is used on the primary side to select a half-bridge or full-bridge resonant circuit to implement 4:1 voltage range operation. On the secondary-side, another ac power switch is adopted to select a full-wave rectifier or voltage-doubler rectifier to achiever an additional 2:1 output voltage range. Therefore, the proposed resonant converter has the capacity for 8:1 (320V similar to 40V) wide output voltage operation. A single-stage hybrid resonant converter is employed in the study circuit instead of a two-stage dc converter to achiever wide voltage range operation. As a result, the study converter has better converter efficiency. The theoretical analysis and circuit characteristics are verified by experiments with a prototype circuit.