2017 Volume E100.B Issue 4 Pages 518-528
The purpose of this paper is to propose a flexible load-dependent digital soft-start control method for dc-dc converters in a 380Vdc system. The soft-start operation is needed to prevent negative effects such as large inrush current and output overshoot to a power supply in the start-up process of dc-dc converters. In the conventional soft-start operation, a dc-dc converter has a very slow start-up to deal with the light load condition. Therefore, it always takes a long time in any load condition to start up a power supply and obtain the desired output. In the proposed soft-start control method, the speed of the start-up process is flexibly controlled depending on the load condition. To obtain the optimal speed for any load condition, the speed of the soft-start is determined from a approximated function of load current, which is estimated from experiment results in advance. The proposed soft-start control method is evaluated both in simulations and experiments. From results, it is confirmed that the proposed method has superior soft-start characteristics compared to the conventional one.
