Modelling and experimental verification of the effect of parasitic elements on the performance of an active-clamped current-fed DC–DC converter

Current-fed DC–DC converter has received a lot of attention recently for the fuel cell power source applications. This is due to its attractive features, such as low input current ripple, high voltage conversion ratio and high efficiency. Unfortunately, a high voltage stress across the switches and hard switching is the main drawback of the current-fed topologies. Therefore, an active clamp circuit is often implemented to suppress any voltage overshoot across the switches and achieving zero-voltage switching. In this paper, based on detailed analysis on the converter performance it was found that parasitic elements of the converter can have a large impact on promising features of current-fed converters with an active clamp. This has not been reported in the literature. It has been shown through an in-depth analysis on the converter that particularly during the switch overlap period the parasitic elements create undesirable oscillations leading to additional circulating energy that adds to the conduction losses of the converter. It also results in voltage ringing across the clamp switch, oscillations in the current through the clamp circuit and high voltages across the bridge switches, even when the switches are conducting. Based on this finding a number of modifications have been proposed and these have been verified by thorough simulation and experiment.