A novel high-efficiency battery charger with a buck zero-voltage-switching resonant converter

The high-frequency resonant converter has numerous well-known advantages over the traditional hard-switching converters. The most important advantage is that it offers a lower switching loss and a higher power density. Additionally, the soft-switching current waveform characterizes a lower electromagnetic interference (EMI). This study presents the circuit configuration with the least components to realize a highly efficient solar energy battery charger with a zero-voltage-switching resonant converter. The optimal values of the resonant components are determined by applying the characteristic curve and the electric functions derived from the circuit configuration. The experiment demonstrates the switching on and off of the main switches in a solar energy battery charger with a zero-voltage-switching resonant converter, wherein the switches are all operated using zero-voltage switching. The circuit efficiency in the overall charging process exceeds 80%.