Snubber Energy Recovery Bridge Leg for Rectifier Applications

Abstract

A novel snubber energy recovery bridge leg for rectifier applications is presented. When the controllable power devices assembled into this bridge leg are turned on, the snubber capacitor is discharged and its stored energy is transferred to the load circuit. The currents flowing through power devices are also limited to the dc current. As a single-phase rectifier example, the experimental prototype employing two insulated-gate bipolar transistors is implemented to investigate the operation under the pulse-width modulation. The experimental results confirm that the input current can be waveshaped sinusoidally with a near-unity power factor.