A Battery Charging Method With Natural Synchronous Rectification Features for Full-Bridge CLLC Converters

The
CLLC
converter is a promising topology for bidirectional power conversation applications, such as vehicle-to-grid (V2G) systems and battery energy storage (BES) systems. Battery charging is one of the most important functions of the
CLLC
converter in V2G and BES applications. Synchronous rectification (SR) is of vital importance in these applications because it can increase efficiency. In this article, a battery charging method with natural SR features is proposed for the full-bridge
CLLC
converter. The proposed method consists of a parameter matching design procedure and SR control. A novel SR principle is adopted in this article. Different from the current SR methods, the parameter design process is taken into consideration for the SR realization. After the parameter matching design procedure, the required
on
-state time of the secondary side switches for the SR is nearly fixed during the whole charging process. As a result, the SR drive signal can be generated directly according to the switching frequency. No sensor detection or software estimation is needed, allowing natural SR to be realized. A lab-level prototype was built to verify the proposed method. The experimental results show an obvious efficiency improvement (up to 2.11%) over the uncontrolled rectification, and the SR of the proposed method is nearly the same as complete SR (with maximum efficiency difference of 0.31%) during the whole battery charging process.