Affiliations: [a] Department of Electronic Engineering and Communications, Universidad de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Mario Pérez-Tarragona, Departamento de Ingeniería Electrónica y Comunicaciones, Universidad de Zaragoza, María de Luna, 1, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain. Tel.: +34 876 555318; Fax: +34 976 762111; E-mail: maperta@unizar.es
Abstract: Flexible cooking surfaces, eg. fully active surfaces, have gained lately an increasing importance in the domestic induction heating. Multi-inverter structures are a cost-efficient solution to develop this technology. However, they add control restrictions that can be solved with a power factor corrector (PFC) stage as proposed in this work. The proposed converter and modulation strategy work with zero voltage switching (ZVS), decreasing the switching losses, enabling a higher working frequency and, therefore, decreasing the magnetic devices size. The bus voltage is controllable and can be increased, easing the load power control and decreasing current through load and inverter and, so, the power losses. Besides, the switching frequency is constant in the mains cycle and can be modified to synchronize the load inverter and the PFC stage avoiding intermodulation noise. A 3.6 kW prototype has been implemented fulfilling the EMC requirements. The experimental waveforms and efficiency have been measured to prove the feasibility of this proposal.
Keywords: Power factor corrector, resonant power conversion, zero voltage switching, home appliances, induction heating
