Soft-switching control circuit based on traveling and reflected waves for high-frequency resonant inverter applicable to capacitive load impedance

esonant inverters are widely utilized to generate high-frequency high voltage A C power for the power supply to the plasma generator. These inverters commonly require the load impedance to be inductive for achieving soft-switching operation. However, the impedance often fluctuates to be momentarily capacitive due to the unstable state of the plasma, thus causing enormous switching loss and possibly destroying the inverters. This paper addresses this difficulty by using a recently-proposed resonant inverter that can achieve soft-switching operation under the capacitive load impedance. For this purpose, this paper proposes a novel soft-switching controller for applying this inverter for plasma generator application. The proposed controller observes the load impedance and controls the resonant inverter according to the impedance value. Because of the high-frequency A C power supply to the plasma generator, the voltage and current measurement are difficult for estimation of the load impedance. Therefore, the proposed controller estimates the load impedance based on traveling and reflected wave measurement. The experiment revealed successful control of the inverter according to the load impedance, suggesting high feasibility for applying the inverter to the plasma generator.