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Registered Member #89
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 02:40PM
Location: Zadar, Croatia
Posts: 3145
Guys, I apologize for my annoyance - I got very confused on all this, but figured it all out in just few lines of chat with Steve C; I also created too much diversion from the thread, hope to finish it in few following rows.
The most important thing I continuously failed to realize that most of the well working SSTC's we built are **already** in or close to class DE! What I did not understand was that these articles are talking about *exactly the same thing* Richie spent so much time explaining in chatroom! ah.
Really all we need to care about to get class DE operation in a common SSTC is adjustment of deadtime - there's already plenty if magnetizing current to provide the commutating action. So the reason why simple designs fail at higher frequencies is simple the lack of adjustable deadtime - which is critical to set up proper class DE operation. DRSSTC's are examples of systems operating in class D, from other side.
I now realized that class DE ultimately fails in favor of class E at point where deadtime and/or magnetizing current just become too large to achieve enough power throughput - at which point class E becomes more favorable.
Having designed Class-DE amplifiers for RF power applications, I can say the biggest limitation to increasing operating frequency beyond a few MHz is this... The bridge leg's mid-point voltage must commutate from one supply rail to the other during the dead-time. It takes lots of current to charge and discharge the MOSFET's Cds capacitances in a short time. As you increase the operating frequency less time is available for this to take place. So you either have to increase the deadtime to the point where it dramatically eats into the total switching period and considerably reduces output power _OR_ you have to tune the output network to get more circulating current during the deadtime to slew the mid-point voltage quicker. Either of these things actually give you less power out, for a given RMS current through the MOSFETs. As you increase the frequency this issue eventually becomes un-manageable. This is the point where a single transistor topology like Class-E can continue operating up to much higher frequencies, because it is not affected by these problems.
...summed excellently. Thanks a lot to richie and all of you guys... (I feel I've got too much offtopic).
Registered Member #1232
Joined: Wed Jan 16 2008, 10:53PM
Location: Doon tha Toon!
Posts: 881
The trick in Class DE is to tune the inverter some amount above the resonant frequency of the load network so that the load current lags the applied voltage by the right amount. Then dead-time is introduced. If the dead-time and the amount of lagging current are just right, then the mid-point voltage of the bridge commutates smoothly from one supply rail to the other rail during the deadtime. (It actually does so with a resonant sinusoidal transition.)
The free-wheeling inductive current caused by tuning above the resonant frequency of the load is what actually charges and discharges the device capacitances and slews the mid-point voltage during the deadtime. When it's all set up properly the voltage across each MOSFET collapses to zero, with a gradient of zero right at the point when the device is about to switch on, in a similar way to Class-E achieves with a single switch.
The voltage output from a properly setup Class-DE half-bridge or full-bridge looks like a squarewave except that the sharp edges are replaced by segments of a sinusoidal curve. The design choices the engineer has to make are how much deadtime should be introduced, how much shunt capacitance to put across the MOSFETs, and how much lagging current to introduce by detuning because these factors affect the tradeoff between conduction losses and switching losses.
Marko: You have no reason to be sorry for not knowing about these things. It's quite a specialised area of power electronics, and if you haven't worked in it or investigated it, you would have no reason to know about it.
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