An Alternative Energy Recovery Clamp Circuit for Full-Bridge PWM Converters With Wide Ranges of Input Voltage

A full-bridge dc--dc converter employing a diode rectifier in the output experiences a severe voltage overshoot and oscillation problem across the diode rectifier caused by interaction between junction capacitance of the rectifier diode and leakage inductance of the transformer. The pronounced reverse-recovery current of high-power diodes significantly contributes to these issues by increasing power loss and voltage overshoot. Conventional energy recovery clamping circuits suffer from high voltage overshoot if the converter input voltage is wide. In this paper, a novel energy recovery clamp circuit is proposed to overcome this problem. The proposed circuit requires neither active switches nor lossy components. Therefore, the proposed circuit is very promising in high-voltage and high-power applications. Performance of the proposed circuit is verified both theoretically and experimentally with a 70-kW dc--dc converter.