3rd IEEE International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed Generation Systems (PEDG) 2012
New control method to increase power regulation in a
AC/AC quasi resonant converter for high efficiency
Induction cooker
Vittorio Crisafulli, Cristiano Vito Pastore
line Whrilpool Europe srl, Italy,
Cassinetta di Biandronno(VA), Italy
Vittorio_claudio_crisafulli@whirlpool.com
Abstract— Quasi Resonant (QR) converters are widely used as
AC current generators for induction. These converters are
particularly attractive because they use just one solid state switch
and only one resonant capacitor to generate a variable
frequency/variable amplitude current to feed the induction coil.
When properly designed and matched with their load, these
converters are known to operate in ZVS at turn on and ZCS at
turn off. For that reason QR converters are considered the best
compromise between cost and energy conversion efficiency.
However, when the power being regulated exceeds a given limit,
the resonating voltage across the solid state switch exceeds its
maximum rating, leading to instantaneous and irreversible
damage of the switch itself. On the other end, operation at light
load implies the loss of ZVS at turn on. Those two limitation lead
to a relatively narrow regulation range defined as the ratio of
maximum achievable power and the minimum achievable power.
In particular, when the output power being regulated falls below
a given limit, the inverter fails to operate in soft switching mode,
leading to a dramatic and unmanageable increase in thermal
losses and Electromagnetic interference. In this paper a new
control algorithm to increase the power regulation ratio in
AC/AC QR converters for induction cooktop is presented. The
method described in this paper substantially increases the
regulation range of QR converters with no penalties in efficiency
and preserving soft switching operation. Furthermore, this
method does not require any additional hardware circuitry or
component but relies only on special SW modulation techniques.
Simulation and experimental results confirm the benefits of this
method compared a standard control, improving power
regulation, and achieving a power increases higher than 20 % for
a typical domestic induction heating load
Keywords-component; Induction Heating, Resonant Converter,
Control;
I. INTRODUCTION
Induction Heating (IH) appeared in the Domestic market in
the early ’80s, and ever since it has become the most appealing
technology in cooking applications. Basically, an Induction
cooker transfers electrical energy by induction from a coil of
wire into a pot made of material which must have high
magnetic permeability. The heat generated is analogous to the
unwanted heat dissipated in an electric transformer; most of the
978-1-4673-2023-8/12/$31.00/ ©2012 IEEE
heat is due to the eddy currents generated in the pot’s bottom
layer. In literature several topologies have been presented, but
the most used are the topologies which contain resonant tanks.
Fig. 1 shows the Common block structure of an inverter for IH,
which is composed by a filter, the resonant converter and the
coils. The main requirements for IH converter are:
• High frequency switching (more than 20 kHz)
• Power factor close to unity
• Ability to handle wide load range
The main advantage of resonant converters consists in their
ability to operate in at high switching frequency with very low
power losses. Several control techniques, like zero current
switching (ZCS) or zero voltage switching (ZVS), can be used
to reduce power loss in resonant converters [1]. The reduction
of switching loss and the continual improvement of power
switches allow the switching frequency of the resonant
converters to reach hundreds of kHz. Consequently, magnetic
component sizes can be reduced and the power density of the
converters increased. Quasi-resonant (QR) converters [2]-[5]
are the best compromise between cost and energy conversion
efficiency. The amplitude of the power deliverable by a QR
converter can be adjusted between two limits (the regulation
range). The amplitude of this range is a characteristic for each
converter of the QR topology and is commonly defined
through the ratio between the maximum achievable power,
which is limited by the maximum admitted voltage across the
switch terminals/junctions, and the minimum settable power,
which is limited by the loss of the Zero Voltage Switching
condition (also named as ZVS or Soft-Switching mode). A
particular difficulty arises for instance when trying to regulate
the average power delivered by the converter to a value below
the minimum selectable power. As will be shown in the next
paragraphs, the main factors that affect the mode of operation
of QR converters (Soft vs. Hard Switching) are the power
output and the loading conditions. In particular, it is known
that, for a given converter, supplied with a given dc-bus
voltage, there is a minimum output power below which the
inverter will fail to soft commutate at turn-on [14]. The most
common workaround for this effect is to not operate the
inverter at power lower than that value, which of course is a
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 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed Generation Systems (PEDG) 2012

Fig. 1: Common block structure of an inverter for Induction Heating.

highly limiting factor for what regards the cooking food, resulting in perceivable power unevenness and possibly
performances when delicate cooking is needed. To actually in food spoilage. Another way to increase the regulation range
achieve ZCS/ZVS operation at turn on for QR converters is presented in [7], where the authors proposed a topological
several conditions have to be met. The conditions will be solution, which, however, increases the complexity and cost of
examined in the remainder of this paper. Unfortunately, not all the overall system.
the conditions are under the designer control. As a
consequence, QR converter cannot always be operated in soft- The method proposed in this paper overcomes the
switching conditions [6]. This not only nullifies the aforementioned drawbacks resulting in a substantial in-crease
aforementioned benefits, but it may also lead to the destruction of the regulation range of QR converters while maintaining the
of the inverter due to thermal causes. Moreover, when the use of soft switching operating mode and without introducing
converter operates in hard switching condition, the generated further limitations in the efficiency/reliability of the converter.
Furthermore, this method does not require any additional
EMI increases significantly, possibly exceeding the maximum
level set by standard. hardware circuitry or component because it relies on an novel
modulation technique.
This paper presents a method to increase the range of
regulation while maintaining the inverter in soft switching
operating mode.
This paper is organized as follows. Section II describes the
state of the art and section III presents the proposed method. In
Section IV simulation results and in Section V experimental
results are presented.

II. STATE OF ART

The simplest mode for overcoming the aforementioned
limitation for QR converter is to operate the inverter in the so-
called burst-mode or ON-OFF mode (as shown in Fig. 2), Fig. 2: State of Art, Burst Mode operation mode.
consisting in operating the inverter for some amount of time
Tactive (during which several charging and discharging phases I. PROPOSED METHOD
occur) at the minimum power level adjustable according to
The method described in this paper gives a solution to the
ZVS conditions, and switching it off for another amount of
aforementioned issue, allowing a significant increase in the
time Tidle. By cyclically alternating over time the two phases,
regulation range of Quasi Resonant Converters (as shown in
the average power delivered to the load can be calculated by
Fig. 3) , with no penalty in the commutation losses, ensuring
multiplying the duty ratio Tactive/(Tactive + Tidle) by the minimum
that soft switching condition is always achieved.
power limit (the minimum settable power in ZVS mode). This
method has the disadvantage that the power is actually The method relies in the deliberate distortion of the mains
delivered to the load (and then ultimately to the food) in a current profile, by changing the TON period throughout the
pulsed and concentrated manner, instead of in a smooth mode. mains semi period, in order to both increase the average
Moreover, considering that the time period of the pulsed power maximum Power without violating the IGBT maximum VCE
is also bounded by regulatory standards (for instance the and decrease the minim power without incurring in the severe
IEC61000-3-3 flicker norm), the power pulsing period can loss due to ZVS at turn on.
hardly be made faster than the thermal time constant of the

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Fig. 3: QR scheme.

20V

T ON T OFF
0V

P e rio d
SEL>>
-10V
V(VGL2:+)
1.00KV

0.75KV

0.50KV
V CE
0.25KV

0V
V(OUT2)
50A

0A
I D ra in -S o u rc e

-50A
15.0ms 15.1ms
I(Z1:C)
T im e
Time

Fig. 4: Typical waveforms of a QR converter.

TON ⋅ Vdc −bus

A. Method to increase PMAX Vres ≅ Eq. 4
Once a given loadin condition (L,R) and mains voltage is LC
set, and a given voltage rating have been chosen for the solid
state switch and resonant capacitor (i.e. 1200 V), it is known Assuming that TON is typically kept constant throughout the
from QR theory of operation that the limiting factor for the mains semi period and is limited to a value which keeps the
maximum power is given by the resonant voltage (Voltage resonant voltage safely below the switch damage voltage (say
across the parallel Cres//(Lres+RLOAD), see Fig. 4), which will 1000 V for a 1200 V device) when Vdc-bus is at its maximum, it
approximately reach the value: is evident that this choice of TON is too conservative whenever
Vdc-bus goes below its maximum, i.e. when the phase of the
2⋅ E mains is different from 90° or 270°. In other words, it can be
Vres ≅ Eq. 1 said that TON is upper bound by the maximum resonant voltage
C that is generated when the DC-bus voltage is at its maximum,
i.e. at 90° and 270° mains electrical degrees. The mains current
Where E is the energy stored into the inductive part of the peak, also obtained at 90° and 270°, is also upper bound by this
load during the TON phase mechanism.
1 The approach that this paper proposes is to increase TON in
E≅ L ⋅ I pk
2
Eq. 2 a way inversely proportional to Vdc-bus. This will cause the
2
mains current profile to depart from a sinusoidal profile, rather
the peak current is proportional to TON, Vdc-bus (Voltage assuming the flat top profile qualitatively shown in Fig. 5. The
across the capacitor CBUS, see Fig. 4) net effect of this distorted main current is to increase the input
power for a given maximum allowed peak current. The flat-top
I pk = TON ⋅ (Vdc −bus / L) Eq. 3 profile of the mains current is far from being perfectly
sinusoidal and so the harmonic input current emissions of the
so the resonant voltage Vres can be expresses in terms of TON QR would be worse compared with the constant TON
and Vdc-bus modulation. The idea is to define an optimized flat-top profile
of mains current that does not exceed the harmonic emissions
limits while, at the same time, allows the increase of the

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 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed Generation Systems (PEDG) 2012

Fig. 5: Voltage and Current line in normal operation mode (a) and with the new control method for increase the maximum power range
(b).

convrter’s output power. The control of the QR converter the proposed control method and performing the required
based on the aforementioned idea can be done in 2 ways as analyses.
shown in Fig. 7 and Fig. 8. The first way, shown in Fig. 7, is
based on standard power-set closed-loop control that also The control algorithm has been implemented using an
contains a specific algorithm that calculates the variable TON Embedded Matlab Function inside a Simulink model (as shown
modulation vs. time at each main half wave starting from a in Fig. 6).
constant TON value, which is calculated by standard PID control The power stage has been simulated using PSPICE (the
for supplying a constant power set target. PSPICE model is shown in Fig. 9) and the control loop has
The other way is based on a closed-loop control whose been implemented in Matlab/Simulink.
input is the error between instantaneous mains current and Fig. 10 , Fig. 11 and Fig. 12 present the simulation results.
target flat-top mains current profile (it is actually a mains As can be seen the proposed control method allows a further
current closed loop instead of the standard one based on a EMI reduction when compared to the traditional control. This
power target). The flat-top mains current profile is calculated effect is due to the fact that applying the proposed method
from the power set target and the mains voltage RMS value. causes frequency modulation, thus spreading the conducted
The aforementioned controllers can be either implemented in emission energy harmonics energy over a larger spectrum, as
analog or in digital form. Should the digital form be preferred, shown in Fig. 12.
the modulation of TON will be done at discrete time intervals,
and with discrete amplitude resolution. In particular the upper
bound for TON time-pace may be determined by the mains
standard about harmonics for home appliance, which are
typically given up to the 50th harmonics, while the lower bound
is typically just limited by the computational performance of
the digital controller being used. Computer simulations on the
gain in power output obtainable by this method, using flat-top
profiles have shown that a 1.25x power increase is achievable
without violating the harmonic emission level allowed the
European Norm on Current Harmonics (IEC 61000-3-2).
Higher power gains are possible with time varying current
modulation strategies, exploiting the higher limit allowed by
the standard for fluctuating harmonics.

II. SIMULATION RESULT Fig. 6: Matlab/Simulink Control Model

Using PSPICE and Matlab simulations, the validity of the
proposed method was confirmed, and several characteristics
were measured and analyzed (Electrical quantities on the
converter, stability of the control loop Harmonic distortion). A
versatile simulation tool has been developed to allow testing

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Fig. 7: IH Power-set closed-loop control

Fig. 8: IH Main current-set closed-loop control

Fig. 9: PSPICE model

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 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed Generation Systems (PEDG) 2012

Vbus
400

300

200

100

0
0.01 0.015 0.02 0.025 0.03 0.035 0.04 0.045 0.05

Icoil
60

40

20
0

-20

-40
0.01 0.015 0.02 0.025 0.03 0.035 0.04 0.045 0.05

Vce

1000

500

0
0.01 0.015 0.02 0.025 0.03 0.035 0.04 0.045 0.05

Line Current
15

10

0
0.01 0.015 0.02 0.025 0.03 0.035 0.04 0.045 0.05

Fig. 10: Waveform from the simulation using the proposed control method
Line Current
20

15

10

-5

-10

-15

-20
0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4
4
x 10
Fig. 11: Waveform from the simulation using the proposed control method

New

Standard

Fig. 12: Comparison of Spectrum obtained with a standard control (red) and the proposed method (blue).

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 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed Generation Systems (PEDG) 2012

10

-5

-10

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18
-3
x 10

Fig. 13: Line current of a IH converter and Prototype picture

III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULT
A QR inverter has been used to test the proposed control
scheme (The lab prototype is shown in Fig. 14). A normative
210 mm pot and a 210 mm coil have been used. The test has
been carried out implementing the flat top profile control
method, obtained by adding the 3rd harmonic to the line current
profile. Measurements have been carried out with a digital
oscilloscope and power analyzer. The switching device was a
1200 V, 40 A IGBT with antiparallel diode. A can be seen in
Fig. 13, the line current shows a flat top profile , due to the flat
top profile control.
Experimental measurements show the increase of power
regulation achievable with the use of the proposed method. Fig.
15 shows that, using the proposed method, the maximum
available output power is in-creased by more than 20 percent
over the standard control. The maximum
output power achieved with the proposed method was 2680 W
with a maximum voltage stress on the switch of 1100V. With
the standard control, with the same voltage stress constrain, the
output power was 2190 W.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper a new control method to increase power
regulation in a AC/AC quasi resonant converter for high
efficiency induction cooker has been presented. The proposed
method is based on a voluntary distortion of the line current,
which allows an increase of the power regulation compared to
the standard method.
The proposed method has been verified trough
experimental tests on an induction heating test bench.
Experimental results confirm the expected benefits of this
method compared to a standard control: improving power
regulation and achieving a power increases higher than 20
percenta typical domestic induction heating load. The proposed
method does not require any extra hardware components and it
can be implemented directly into the controller of the IH power
converters.
Normalized Maximum Power available Standard control versus the new
control method
1,4

]
%
[ 1,2
le
ba
li
a 1
va
re
w Standard Control
o0,8
p
m New control
u
m
i 0,6 method
xa
M
de0,4
iz
laa
m
r 0,2
o
N

0
Control strategy

Fig. 15: Normalized Maximum Power available Standard control

Fig. 14: Prototype picture versus the new control method

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 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed Generation Systems (PEDG) 2012
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