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In this paper, a buck based active-clamp circuit for current-fed isolated DC-DC converters is proposed. The proposed active-clamp circuit can not only suppress the voltage spikes caused by the current difference between the current-fed inductor and leakage inductor of the transformer, but also transfer the energy of the above process to the input voltage source. Different from the traditional active-clamp circuit, the proposed active-clamp circuit needs only one switch regardless of the number of input phases in the main circuit. Moreover, the control of the proposed active-clamp circuit is decoupled with the main circuit, which makes the design and implementation of the system controller easier. A 400W experimental prototype has been built to verify the effectiveness of the proposed circuit.

The voltage conversion ratio of basic dc/dc converters is limited due to the influence of parasitic elements of circuits and components. In this article, a family of passive circuits termed as “coat circuits” are proposed for conventional dc/dc converters. Not only voltage step-up capacity can be improved but also the voltage stress of components can be decreased by adding coat circuits to basic dc/dc converters. Moreover, no additional active switches are needed in the coat circuits, that means the control and driver circuits of the converters are not changed. The Cuk converter with the coat circuit has been analyzed as an example, and a 200 W experimental prototype has been built to verify the validity of the theoretical analysis.