A High-Voltage Capacitor Charger Based on a Novel LCCL Resonant Converter

High voltage/high power capacitor chargers are primarily interested in many industrial applications. Resonant converters have been a proper choice in such applications because of their advantages. However, the performance of the resonant converter is highly affected by the parasitic elements of the high voltage/high power transformer. Also, short circuit condition is a frequent event in high voltage applications, so that the resonant converter should be robust against the short circuit condition. This paper presents a novel LCCL resonant converter with current source characteristics used as a high voltage capacitor charger. The proposed resonant converter eliminates the undesirable effect of the stray capacitance in high voltage devices and is robust against the short circuit condition inherently. It also provides a semi-trapezoidal resonant current wave which produces a lower crest factor. Furthermore, a frequency-sweep operation is applied, which has advantages in reducing the resonant current's peak value and the resonant network's size. Simulation results show a satisfactory performance of the proposed resonant converter. Moreover, experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed resonant converter in the application of capacitor charging.