A Novel and Cost-Effective Drive Circuit for Supplying a Piezoelectric Ceramic Actuator with Power-Factor-Correction and Soft-Switching Features

This paper proposes a novel and cost-effective drive circuit for supplying a piezoelectric ceramic actuator, which combines a dual boost AC-DC converter with a coupled inductor and a half-bridge resonant DC-AC inverter into a single-stage architecture with power-factor-correction (PFC) and soft-switching characteristics. The coupled inductor of the dual boost AC-DC converter sub-circuit is designed to work in discontinuous conduction mode (DCM), so the PFC function can be realized in the proposed drive circuit. The resonant tank of the half-bridge resonant inverter sub-circuit is designed as an inductive load, so that the two power switches in the presented drive circuit can achieve zero-voltage switching (ZVS) characteristics. A 50 W-rated prototype drive circuit providing a piezoelectric ceramic actuator has been successfully implemented in this paper. From the experimental results at 110 V input utility-line voltage, the drive circuit has the characteristics of high power factor and low input current total-harmonic-distortion factor, and two power switches have ZVS characteristics. Therefore, satisfactory outcomes from measured results prove the function of the proposed drive circuit.