A time-sharing high-frequency inverter for all metal IH cooking appliances

In recent years, induction heating (IH) cookers using a high-frequency (HF) inverter for home use have become increasingly popular because of their cleanliness, high efficiency, safety, and so on. With regard to the domestic consumer markets, effective applicability to a variety of pan materials such as low resistivity materials (aluminum and copper) and high-resistivity materials (iron and magnetic stainless steel) is one of the important issues. In this paper, a time-sharing HF inverter for IH cooking appliances that enables doubling of the output frequency of the switching operation is proposed. The proposed HF resonant inverter is able to reduce switching losses by the frequency doubler and the soft-switching operation. Furthermore, the current rating of the switching power devices is reduced because of the parallel-connected circuit configuration. The basic principle of the proposed time-sharing HF inverter is discussed in detail. The performance and effectiveness of the proposed time-sharing HF inverter are confirmed by experimental point of view.