A passive soft-switching snubber for PWM inverters

Abstract

This paper presents a regenerative passive snubber circuit for pulse-width modulation (PWM) inverters to achieve soft-switching purposes without significant cost and reliability penalties. This passive soft-switching snubber (PSSS) employs a diode/capacitor snubber circuit for each switching device in an inverter to provide low dv/dt and low switching losses to the device. The PSSS further uses a transformer-based energy regenerative circuit to recover the energy captured in the snubber capacitors. All components in the PSSS circuit are passive, thus leading to reliable and low-cost advantages over those soft-switching schemes relying on additional active switches. The snubber has been incorporated into a 150 kVA PWM inverter. Simulation and experimental results are given to demonstrate the validity and features of the snubber circuit.