Beijing Converters: Bridge Converters With a Capacitor Added to Reduce Leakage Currents, DC-Bus Voltage Ripples, and Total Capacitance Required

Isolation transformers and bulky electrolytic capacitors are often used in power electronic converters to reduce leakage currents and voltage ripples but this leads to low power density and reduced reliability. In this paper, an auxiliary capacitor is added to the widely used conventional full-bridge converter to provide a path for, and hence significantly reduce, the leakage current. The operation of the full-bridge converter is split into the operation of a half-bridge converter and a dc-dc converter so that the ripple energy can be diverted from the dc-bus capacitor to the auxiliary capacitor. Hence, the dc-bus capacitor can be significantly reduced while maintaining very low voltage ripples on the dc bus because it is only required to filter out switching ripples. The auxiliary capacitor is designed to allow high voltage ripples because its voltage is not supplied to any load. Accordingly, the auxiliary capacitor can also be very small as well. As a result, the total required capacitance becomes very small. The reduction ratio of the total capacitance is significant, which makes it cost-effective to use film capacitors instead of electrolytic capacitors. The proposed converters can be also operated as an inverter without any restriction on power factor because the adopted four switches are all bidirectional in terms of power flow. Experimental results for both rectification and inversion modes are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed converter in reducing the ripples, the leakage currents, and the total capacitance needed, with comparison to the conventional bridge converter without the auxiliary capacitor.