ICT equipment is usually replaced at regular intervals, usually before the equipment has failed, opening up the opportunity of providing a second-life through repurposing. In this paper we investigate the technical feasibility of repurposing the standard ATX power supply found in many desktop computers into a 12V battery charger. We provide an overview of the ATX power supply before describing how the power supply may be modified into a battery charger alongside experimental results.
This paper proposes a new design approach for two nonidentical converters connected in parallel to obtain higher efficiency across the load range. This is achieved by allowing one converter to be designed for efficiency, without being constrained by system requirements, such as the transient response and current ripple, which will be met by the second converter. The efficiency of the proposed parallel converter is compared to an interleaved converter, both in theory and in practice.
The paper proposes a novel battery charger through use of two serially-connected LLC resonant converters. The first stage utilises a capacitor-diode clamped LLC resonant converter which allows operation in both constant voltage (CV) and constant current (CC) modes, as found in most battery chargers, to be realised, whilst the second stage provides the necessary gain and line and load regulation. A design example is included that demonstrates the resulting converter topology operating under the full battery charging conditions and its inherent current-limiting capability. Experimental results are used to validate the underlying approach.
Optimal-time control to minimise a converter's recovery time has thus far been reported only for single power module converters. This paper adapts the optimal-time control problem and applies it to converters based on multiple power modules. Additionally, a novel minimum charge-recovery time control is also proposed for the multiple power module converter which produces a recovery time shorter than that in the optimal-time control. A 20 W converter is used to demonstrate the improved characteristics under primary regions of operation. Results show that the transient recovery time during a load step change is improved by 75% compared to traditional optimal time control.
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