Analysis and Compensation of Dead-Time Effect of a ZVT PWM Inverter Considering the Rise- and Fall-Times

Abstract: The dead-time effect, as an intrinsic problem of the converters based on the half-bridge unit, leads to distortions in the converter output. Although several dead-time effect compensation or elimination methods have been proposed, they cannot fully remove the dead-time effect of blanking delay error, because the output current polarity is difficult detect accurately. This paper utilizes the zero-voltage-switching (ZVT) technique to eliminate the blanking delay error, which is the main drawback of the hard-switching inverter, although the technique initially aims to improve the efficiency. A typical ZVT inverter—the auxiliary resonant snubber inverter (ARSI) is analyzed. The blanking delay error is completely eliminated in the ARSI. Another error source caused by the finite riseand fall-times of the voltage is analyzed, which was not considered in the hard-switching inverter. A compensation method based on the voltage error estimation is proposed to compensate the riseand fall-error. A prototype was developed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control. Both the simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the qualities of the output current and voltage in the ARSI are better than that in the hard-switching inverter due to the elimination of the blanking delay error. The total harmonic distortion (THD) of the output is further reduced by using the proposed compensation method in the ARSI.