Development of 60 kV, 300 A, 3 kHz Pulsed Power Modulator for Wide Applications

Abstract

In this paper, a novel pulsed power generator based on IGBT stacks is proposed for wide pulsed power applications. Because it can generate high voltage pulsed output without any step-up transformer or pulse forming network, it has advantages of fast rising time, easiness of pulse width variation, high repetition rate and rectangular pulse shapes. Proposed scheme consists of multiple power stages which were charged parallel from series resonant power inverter. Depending on the number of power stages it can increase maximum voltage up to 60 kV or higher with no limits of power stages. To reduce component for gate power supply, a simple and robust gate drive circuit which delivers gate power and gate signal simultaneously by way of one high voltage cable is proposed. For gating signal and power a full bridge inverter and pulse transformer generates on-off signals of IGBT gating with gate power simultaneously and it has very good characteristics of protection of IGBT switches over arcing condition. It can be used for various kinds of pulse power application such as plasma source ion implantation, sterilization, water and gas treatment which requires few kHz pulse repetition rate with few to ten of microseconds pulse width.

Pulsed-Power System for Leachate Treatment Applications

“…The experimental waveforms of the output pulses for the variable output voltage, the pulse width, and the frequency operation have been obtained previously [9]. Therefore, this paper only presents the waveforms of the modified parts, the charger, and the driver circuit.…”

“…The basic structure of the developed pulsed-power modulator is similar to the Marx generator, where the capacitor is charged separately and all of the capacitors are connected in series to generate a high voltage through the semiconductor switches. [9] The overall structure of the developed pulsed-power modulator is shown in Fig. 1.…”

“…The detailed operational principle of this topology was first introduced with an average power of 10 kW. [9] However, for high-power applications such as water treatment systems, which require a high repetition rate with a high output voltage, an average output power of 10 kW is insufficient. In this paper, to increase the average output power from 10 to 15 kW, the charger was modified while maintaining the same topology.…”

“…Therefore, solid-state pulsed-power modulators, made using a semiconductor switch instead of a gas switch, have been focused on. [5]- [9] This paper describes a water treatment system with a novel solid-state pulsed-power modulator that takes into account the abovementioned considerations.…”

Compact and high repetitive pulsed power modulator based on semiconductor switches

“…To solve these problems, a simple gate drive circuit based on a current loop that can transfer the signal and power simultaneously through a one-turn transformer was proposed with the power-cell-based IGBT stacking structure, which consists of one IGBT with one storage capacitor and a bypass diode [4]. It facilitatesthe variation of the pulse width and the repetition rate with the on/off pulse generated from the full-bridge inverter.…”