Virginia Tech FEEC
Home Faculty and Staff Students Alumni Projects Affiliates & Sponsors Facilities Publications News & Events Photos

Induction Cooker

A conventional induction cooker relies on magnetic flux coupling, which requires a cooking pan to be magnetic conductive, and thus is not suitable for aluminum cookware. Recent commercial designs combine flux coupling and conductive heating to create a universal cooking engine. However, in this design heat loss is unavoidable, reducing the overall efficiency.

This project will create a more efficient induction cooker.

Key Features and Goals

  • Pure inductive aluminum cooking engine that eliminates the conductive path
  • Addition of a boost converter to maintain constant input voltage at the resonant converter input
  • Precise tracking mechanism to ensure proper switching frequency that allows sufficient inductive coupling and zero-voltage soft switching


Block diagram of aluminum pan cooking engine


A full-bridge type resonant converter would be the preferred approach, as the output voltage needs to be as high as possible.



Circuit diagram of the proposed aluminum cooking engine using an interleaved boost stage and a full-bridge resonant converter


For reasons of cost efficiency, a reduced-switch-count converter may be used. Here, the front-end boost converter remains the same, but the resonant circuit requires only two switches. This may be considered at later stages of the project.



Circuit diagram of the proposed aluminum cooking engine using an interleaved boost stage and a half-bridge resonant converter



Contact

Address: 220 Inventive Ln, Blacksburg, VA 24061
Tel: (540) 231-5581   Fax: (540) 231-3362

Copyright 2022, Virginia Tech FEEC