Induction heating technology is nowadays the heating technology of choice in many industrial, domestic, and medical applications due to its advantages regarding efficiency, fast heating, safety, cleanness, and accurate control. Advances in key technologies, i.e. power electronics, control techniques, and magnetic component design, have allowed the development of highly reliable and cost-effective systems, making this technology readily available and ubiquitous. This paper reviews induction heating technology summarizing the main milestones in its development, and analyzing the current state-of-art of induction heating systems in industrial, domestic and medical applications, paying special attention to the key enabling technologies involved. Finally, an overview of future research trends and challenges is given, highlighting the promising future of induction heating technology. Index terms-Induction heating, resonant power conversion, electromagnetic analysis.
This paper presents a 100 kW, 100 kHz IGBT series resonant inverter for induction heating applications that uses an improved power control scheme based on the standard pulse density modulation (PDM). This standard power control is a good solution for the design of high frequency inverters because the output power factor is near to unity in a wide range of output power, resulting in a great reduction of switching losses and electromagnetic noise. However, the output current can be in discontinuous mode especially for resonant loads of low quality factor or for low output power or low load operation. This output current fluctuation produces a high output current ripple that can lead to an increase of power losses and loss of accuracy of the response of the frequency tracking control. The proposed control strategy, called enhanced pulse density modulation (EPDM), provides twice less output current ripple, thus resulting in an improved inverter behaviour in terms of frequency tracking accuracy and energy efficiency. Experimental tests have been made in order to compare the EPDM strategy with standard power control schemes.
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