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, a 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 article 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 semitrapezoidal 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.