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

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

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.