Novel passive lossless soft-clamped snubber for voltage source inverters

A novel passive lossless soft-clamped snubber circuit for voltage source inverters is proposed. The energy trapped in the inductive turn-on snubber is recovered into the DC supply and load, without any active devices, associated control circuitry or resistors. The overshoot voltage on the main power switches is clamped and the peak switch current is low. This snubber circuit is suitable for use in high power insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) inverters.

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