Topology Morphing Control Strategies for Full-

bridge LLC Converter

Yuqi Wei, and Alan Mantooth
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, USA
yuqiwei@uark.edu

Abstract—Wide soft switching operation range, high
frequency operation, and simple control strategy are the main
characteristics for LLC converter. Thus, it has been widely used
in industry. In particular, renewable energy systems, like
photovoltaic (PV) and fuel cell, require wide voltage gain range
application, which is challenging for traditional LLC converters
since wide switching frequency variation range is necessary. To
narrow down the switching frequency operation range, in this
paper, the topology morphing control strategies for full-bridge
LLC converter are investigated. The traditional full-bridge
LLC converter can operate as half-bridge mode or frequency
2020 5th IEEE Workshop on the Electronic Grid (eGRID) | 978-1-7281-9071-6/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/EGRID48559.2020.9330664
frequency doubler mode is proposed. The rest of this paper is
organized as follows: in Section II, the detail discussions for
each operation mode of full-bridge LLC converter are
discussed and the proposed control diagram is presented. The
design considerations for the converter are detailed in Section
III. In Section IV, the experimental results are analyzed to
validate the effectiveness of the converter. Finally,
conclusions are drawn.
II. TOPOLOGY MORPHING CONTROL STRATEGIES FOR THE
PROPOSED CONVERTER

doubler operation mode by simply modifying the gate signals.

Then, the converter voltage gain is doubled when compared
with traditional full-bridge converter, and only half of the
switching frequency operation range is required to cover the
same voltage gain range. Operational principles, comparative
analysis, and experimental validation are presented.
Keywords—LLC converter, wide gain range, topology
morphing control
In this Section, three different operation modes for full-
bridge LLC converter are discussed.
Fig. 1 shows the topology of the full-bridge LLC
converter. The secondary rectifier can be replaced by
transformer center-tapped rectifier or voltage doubler rectifier
based on the applications.

I. INTRODUCTION
Although LLC converters have gained much popularity in
many different industrial applications [1]-[10], wide voltage
range applications are still challenging due to the very wide
operating switching frequency range, which brings difficulty
to magnetic components design and degrade the converter
electro-magnetic interference (EMI) performance. Moreover,
large reactive power exists due to the small magnetizing
inductance value, and ultimately reduce the converter Fig. 1. Circuit diagram for full-bridge LLC converter.
efficiency.
The gate sequence for traditional full-bridge mode is
To make the LLC converter suitable for wide range shown in Fig. 2(a). Please note that in reality, a deadtime is
applications, many novel LLC topologies have been proposed required in one switching leg. If switch S3 is ON and S2 is OFF
[11, 12]. For example, in [11], the transformer turns ratio can permanently as shown in Fig. 2(b), the converter is operating
be dynamically adjusted according to the input voltage. in half-bridge mode. While the frequency doubler operation
Although the converter voltage gain range can be extended, mode for full-bridge LLC converter is shown in Fig. 2(c).
additional semiconductors are required, which increases the Compared with half-bridge mode, in frequency doubler
cost and size of the converter. In [12], the converter voltage operation mode, the duty ratio is not 0.5, and the switching
gain range is extended by adjusting the equivalent frequency is doubled as shown in the waveform of inverter
magnetizing inductance value, and two LLC resonant tanks output voltage. The inverter output voltage waveform is
and two secondary rectifiers are required. similar to half-bridge mode, so the voltage gain is half of the
Another promising solution for wide range application is full-bridge mode.
topology morphing control, where no additional components
are required, the converter operation mode can be modified by
changing the gating signals. In [13, 14], the full-bridge LLC
converter with full-bridge and half-bridge modes are
investigated. In [15], the stacked structure LLC converter with
half-bridge and frequency doubler operation mode is studied.
The topology morphing control strategy for full-bridge LLC
converter with different combinations are investigated. In this
article, a novel combination of full-bridge mode and

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 (a) Full-bridge

Fig. 3. Control diagram for the proposed converter with topology morphing
control.

III. DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS

According to the characteristics of different operation
modes, the mode transitioning point for the converter is set as
200 V to ensure symmetric operation of two different
operation modes. In contrast, the mode transitioning point is
selected based on the efficiency curve in [14]. Although the
(b) Half-bridge high efficiency characteristic is achieved, the switching
frequency operating range is asymmetric in two operation
modes.

(c) Frequency doubler

Fig. 2. Gate sequence for different operation modes of full-bridge LLC
converter.

Another difference between the half-bridge mode and In this work, the transformer turns ratio is calculated
frequency doubler mode is that during mode transition, for according the resonant frequency operation pint, which is
example, when the converter needs to transit from full-bridge designed as 160 V for full-bridge.
mode to half-bridge mode, the duty ratio variation for S2 and Vi
S3 is 0.5. While for the frequency doubler operation mode, the N= (1)
duty ratio difference is only 0.25, which would help reduce Vo
voltage and current spikes during mode transitions. From the
driving and conduction losses perspectives, both half-bridge By taking the secondary rectifier voltage drops into
mode and frequency doubler mode has the same efficiency consideration, N=4.2 can be calculated. The converter
performance. Although the switching frequency is halved for maximum voltage gain is 1.6. It is known that a large Q value
frequency doubler operation mode, the turn-off loss exists for and K value will lead to the decrease of maximum voltage gain.
four switches, while only two switches have turn-off loss for The definitions of K and Q are shown below.
half-bridge mode.
Lm
K= (2)
Fig. 3 shows the control diagram of the proposed topology Lr
morphing control for LLC converter. The operation mode of
the full-bridge LLC converter is determined based on the Lr
input voltage. If the voltage reaches the topology morphing Q= Cr (3)
point, then the operation mode of the full-bridge LLC Rac
converter is adjusted. The output voltage is sampled and the
8n 2
traditional frequency control is used to regulate the output Rac = RL (4)
voltage during the whole operation range. In Fig. 3, VCO π2
represents for voltage controlled oscillator, and the output of The converter voltage gain curves are shown in Fig. 4,
VCO block is the required switching frequency. where different combinations of inductor ratio and quality
factor values are demonstrated. The voltage gain requirement
is the fundamental design factor for LLC converter.

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 Appropriate values should be chosen from the voltage gain
perspective.

(a) Vin=100 V

Fig. 4. Different combinations of inductor ratio and quality factor.

(b) Vin=160 V
Furthermore, the upper boundary for the magnetizing
inductance value is restricted by the zero-voltage switching
(ZVS) operation requirement of the primary switch as
expressed in Eq. (5).
NVotdead
Lm ≤ (5)
16VifsCds

where tdead is the deadtime and Cds is the junction capacitance

of primary switch. Please note that in order to have an accurate
ZVS analysis of the primary switch, the circuit parasitic
capacitances including printed circuit board (PCB) stray
capacitance, transformer stray capacitance and secondary
rectifier diode junction capacitance should be considered.
Therefore, by taking the maximum voltage gain and ZVS
operation requirements into consideration, the resonant tank
parameters are selected as: Cr=66 nF, Lr=38 μH, Lm=200 μH.
IV. EXPERIMENT RESULTS
The experiment setup is shown in Fig. 5. TMSF2835
digital controller from Texas Instrument is used to achieve
topology morphing control of the proposed converter.
(c) Vin=200 V
Fig. 6. Experiment waveforms in full-bridge mode.
Fig. 7 shows the experiment waveforms in frequency
doubler operation mode when input voltage equals 200 V, 320
V, and 400 V. The resonant frequency operation is achieved
at 320 V. From the inverter output voltage waveform, it can
be seen that the converter is operating in frequency doubler
operation mode, the operation waveforms are same as the full-
bridge waveform due to the symmetric voltage gain range of
two operation modes, which can reduce the switching
frequency range to the maximum extent.

(a) Vin=200 V

Fig. 5. Experiment setup.

Fig. 6 shows the experiment waveforms when the

converter operating in full-bridge mode with input voltage of
100 V, 160 V and 200 V. Clearly, the resonant frequency
operation is achieved at 160 V.

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 (b) Vin=320 V
(c) Vin=400 V
Fig. 7. Experiment waveforms in frequency doubler mode.
Fig. 8 shows the mode transition waveforms. As can be
observed from the experiment waveforms, large voltage
overshoot and undershoot during the mode transitions exist.
When the LLC converter is operating in full-bridge mode at
the transition point, the switching frequency is greater than the
resonant frequency to reduce the converter voltage gain.
While in the half-bridge mode at the transition point, the
switching frequency is less than the resonant frequency to
boost the converter voltage gain. Due to the large difference
of switching frequency, for example, when the converter is
operating from full-bridge mode to half-bridge mode, the
switching frequency is too large for half-bridge mode so that
there is a large undershoot during this mode transition. In
contrast, the switching frequency is too low for the full-bridge
mode when the converter is operating from half-bridge to full-
bridge so that there is a large voltage overshoot. To address
this issue, the authors in [14] proposed a smooth mode strategy,
where a small period is inserted to gradually adjust the duty
ratio from 0.5 to 1 or 0.5 to 0. Although the large voltage
transients can be mitigated, the asymmetric operation of the
transformer will cause core saturation.
(a) Full-bridge to half-bridge
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(b) Half-bridge to full-bridge
Fig. 8. Experiment waveforms during mode transition without smooth
transition strategy.
V. CONCLUSIONS
In this article, a novel combination of full-bridge and
frequency doubler operation modes is proposed. By simply
modifying the gate sequence for the full-bridge switches, the
converter can operate in two different operation modes,
namely full-bridge and frequency doubler operation modes,
which can extend the voltage gain range. A switching
frequency operating range reduction and high efficiency
operation can be achieved when compared with traditional
LLC converter. Both the steady state and dynamic mode
transition are investigated experimentally, a smooth mode
transition strategy is proposed to mitigate the large voltage
transients during mode transitions.
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