Development of Cascaded Power Converters for High-Voltage and Constant-Current Applications

This article investigates a novel charging scheme for pulsed power applications. A universal charger is proposed in this article for constant-current (CC) applications. Unlike the conventional dc power supply, the proposed universal charger can be used anywhere in the world. High voltage gain and CC are the two attentive parameters of this novel two-stage charging scheme. The first stage is a duty cycle-controlled coupled inductor (CI)-based high-gain dc-dc boost converter, designed to provide a fixed voltage across the load for different rectified ac voltages such as 200, 220, 240, 400, 415, and 440 V, respectively. The second stage is a ladder-type (LA-3) resonant converter (RC) cascaded with the first stage. The proposed LA-3 RC is modeled to provide load-independent CC (LICC) and high voltage gain. Overall voltage gain drawn from the proposed charging scheme is nearly 6 @ LICC. A detailed mathematical analysis is carried out, and the circuit has been realized in the MATLAB software environment. The results obtained from mathematical conditions, simulation, and the hardware setup were found to be in close agreement with each other.