A high voltage with a very short duration and fast rising time is beneficial to generate uniform and diffuse plasma in dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) loads, and a power supply with a high power factor (PF) can reduce the impact on the power grid. According to two requirements, a unipolar high voltage pulsed power supply with power factor correction (PFC) is proposed in this paper. The power supply consists of a unipolar pulse high voltage generating unit, a PFC unit, and a driving circuit. By introducing a feedback clamping diode and a reverse current blocking diode in a flyback converter, repetitive nanosecond pulses are generated in the unipolar pulse high voltage generating unit. Because a discontinuous current mode strategy is adopted in the PFC unit and the driving signal is shared by the two units, a compact structure of the power supply is achieved, and a high PF is obtained. To validate the proposed pulsed power supply, an experimental setup is built for a DBD excimer lamp. The results show that the proposed power supply has the capability of not only providing a unipolar nanosecond pulse high voltage for the DBD excimer lamp but also achieving PF close to 1 and total harmonic distortion of less than 24%.
SummaryAn excitation voltage with a high rising rate, falling rate, and idle time simultaneously is beneficial to taking advantage of the potential of dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) loads. However, how to generate this kind of excitation voltage with a simple structure is rarely researched. To address the issue, a novel LC‐based bipolar high‐voltage pulsed power supply is proposed in this paper. The proposed power supply is comprised of an inductance, two capacitances, a step‐up transformer, and two power switches sharing the same ground. By planning the switch sequence of the two power switches, a resonant stage and an idle stage are formed. The resonant stage is used to generate a bipolar pulse excitation voltage on DBD excimer lamps and an idle time in the excitation voltage is generated in the idle stage. The characteristics and the parameters design of the proposed power supply are studied by theoretical analysis. To verify the feasibility of the proposed power supply, an experimental setup is built with a DBD‐type excimer lamp. The experimental results show that the power supply not only better takes advantage of the potential of DBD excimer lamps, but also there is a fine luminous regulation feature for the excimer lamp. Besides these characteristics, the proposed power supply has several other benefits, such as good adaptability to different DBD‐type excimer lamps, a small number of components, and high efficiency.
Purpose
How to use a simple and classical topology to provide a high-efficiency excitation voltage for dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) loads is one of the primary problems to be solved for DBD application fields.
Design/methodology/approach
To address the issue, a set of modes that can generate a high-efficiency pulse excitation voltage in a full-bridge inverter are adopted. With the set of modes, the unique equivalent circuit of DBD loads and the parasitic parameter of the step-up transformer can be fully used. Based on the set of modes, a control strategy for the full-bridge inverter is designed. To test the performance of the power supply, a simulation model is established and an experimental prototype is made with a DBD excimer lamp.
Findings
The simulation and experimental results show that not only a high-efficiency excitation voltage can be generated for the DBD load, but also the soft switching of all power switch is realized. Besides this, with the set of modes and the proposed control strategy, the inverter can operate in a high frequency. Compared with other types of power supplies, the power supply used in the paper can fully take advantage of the potential of the excimer lamp at the same input power.
Originality/value
This work considers that how to use a simple and classical topology to provide a high-efficiency excitation voltage for DBD loads is one of the primary problems to be solved for DBD application fields.
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