1 Design of Snubbers for Power Circuits

Before getting into the design of snubbers it is important to understand the waveforms which occur naturally in power circuits. These provide both the motivation for using snubbers and the information needed for their design. There are many different types of circuits used in power converters, motor drives, lamp ballasts and other devices. Fortunately all of these different circuits have a common network and waveforms associated with the switches. Figure 1 shows four widely used circuits. All of these circuits, and in fact most power electronics circuits, have within them the same switch-diodeinductor network shown within the dotted lines. The behavior of this network is the same in all these circuits which means that we only have to solve the snubber design problem for one circuit to apply it to all of the others. This tremendously simplifies the problem and allows generalized snubber design techniques.