Induction heating is now gradually emerging as a very reliable technology for providing faster heating in domestic and various industrial applications. It finds profound acceptability in the appliances like domestic induction cookers regarding its advantages of very fast heating, efficiency, accurate power and temperature control. Any induction heating system requires three major components, a high frequency power converter, resonant tank circuit and control circuit respectively. Recently, new research trends in the field of domestic induction heating pursue the design and implementation of new bridgeless topologies to make efficient and cost-effective domestic induction heaters. In this paper, a highly efficient direct ac-ac boost converter based induction heater is proposed employing a full-bridge series resonant inverter (FB-SRI) with insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) as the power electronic switch. Power requirement of the induction heater is continuously regulated using a closed loop control system. The proposed inverter incorporates a voltage boost control technique using only two diodes for rectification of the main supply voltage. After maintaining proper sequence of firing the IGBTs, the converter can operate with zero-voltage switching (ZVS) during both switch-on and switch-off conditions. The performance of the proposed induction heating system is later compared with a conventional full-bridge (FB) series resonant inverter (SRI) based induction heater. The entire analysis is simulated using PSIM software environment.

Keywords: Induction heating, Insulated gate bipolar transistor, Switching loss, Duty cycle, Zero-voltage switching (ZVS)