Analysis and Implementation of A Passive Lossless Soft-Switching Snubber for PWM Inverters

In this paper, a passive lossless snubber circuit for pulse width modulation (PWM) inverters is proposed to achieve soft-switching purpose without extra switch or additional control circuitry. This passive lossless soft-switching snubber employs an inductor/capacitor snubber structure for each switching device in an inverter to achieve passive zero-current turn ON and zero-voltage turn OFF. Furthermore, inductors coupled closely on a single core are used to losslessly recover snubber energy to the input in the proposed snubber. In addition, freewheeling of output phase current of inverters can be realized via energy storage components of the snubber during the dead time to reduce the effect of dead time. The distortion ratio of the output phase current in low output frequency is also reduced. All components in the snubber circuit are passive, and thus have a better price/performance ratio than their active counterparts. The proposed snubber has been incorporated into a 14-kW PWM inverter. Experimental results are given to demonstrate the validity and features of the snubber.