Design Methodology of 3 kW Induction Heating System for both Low Resistance and High Resistance Containers in a Single Burner

Abstract

Conventional resonant converters for IH applications dedicated to IH-Only containers have been designed for heating the high-resistance containers made by specific manufacturers such as All-Clad and .... Because the IH-Only container made by the other manufacturers has relatively low-resistance which induces large resonant current to power switches in series resonant IH inverters. Hence, the rated power cannot be transferred to the container due to overcurrent passing through the low impedance container, which is higher than the rated switch current. However, the heating capability for various materials is significant to the usability of IH products. In this paper, the boost-type half-bridge series resonant converter is adopted to enlarge the heating capability for the various IH-Only containers which have different impedance to each other. The boost PFC can change the magnitude of a DC-link voltage according to the impedance of the IH-Only container. In this paper, the design methodology of the resonant converter and the IH coil are proposed to properly heat the IH-Only containers which have various impedance. The validity of the design method and the control algorithm is experimentally verified using a 3 kW prototype series resonant half-bridge inverter with the IH coil.