Design and Development of a New Soft-Switching Buck Converter

The buck converter is a first and prominent member of dc-dc converters. It is commonly used for transforming electrical power at fixed voltage level to reduced voltage level.it is used in low power sector such as domestic application as well as high power like commercial, industrial application. A buck converter is implementaed by the combination of filter inductor, capacitor, free-wheeling diode, snubber and power electronics switches. But thesepower electronic switches suffer from hard-switching. As a consiquence, it introduce switching loss and causes reduction in efficency. With rapid development in semiconductor devices and significant utility in various applications, the demand of this converter is gaining momentum. But due to hard-switching of this devices, the aspect of better efficiency is a primary goal for power engineers. So the soft-switching, which is an alternative solution for the devices in these converters, need to be critically investigated. As far as the soft-switching of various dc-dc converters is concerned, the papers relevant to buck converter are lacking in literature. The addition of more than one or two switches in most cases makes the topology complex for the soft-switching operation due to which academicians and researchers lack interest in further investigation of these types topologies. Sometimes the addition of coupling inductor for isolation adds space and weight to these topologies. A modified soft-switching topology of buck converter has been proposed in this research work. It is non-isolated type and facilitates the soft-switching of the device. In order to enable soft-switching for the devices, the components of this converter are designed. The simulation is implemented with the help of MATLAB/Simulink for proposed circuit to justify the performance.