A CW CO2 laser using a high-voltage Dc–dc converter with resonant inverter and Cockroft–Walton multiplier

I propose a high-voltage Dc–dc converter for a CW (continuous wave) CO2 laser system using a current resonant half-bridge inverter and a Cockcroft–Walton circuit. This high-voltage power supply includes a two-stage voltage multiplier driven by a regulated half-bridge series resonant inverter. The inverter drives a step-up transformer and the secondary transformer is applied to the voltage multiplier. It is highly efficient because of the reduced amount of switching losses by virtue of the current resonant half-bridge inverter, and also due to the small size, low parasitic capacitance in the transformer stage owing to the low number of winding turns of the step-up secondary transformer combined with the Cockroft–Walton circuit. I obtained a maximum laser output power of 44 W, a maximum system efficiency of over 16%, and the stability of laser output power of about 4.6% in this laser system.