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.

This paper describes the design of a compact and highly repetitive pulsed power modulator based on semiconductor switches. Output specifications of the proposed modulator are as follows: variable output pulse voltage, 1-10 kV; width, 1-10 µs; pulse repetition rate (PRR), 1-50,000 pps; and average output power, 10 kW. The proposed solid-state pulsed power modulator has two main parts: an IGBT stack that hasa gate drive circuit for the pulse output with a variable pulse width and repetition rate, and a capacitor charger that has a controllable output voltage. To connect all the storage capacitors in a series for high voltage pulses, a simple and reliable IGBT stack structure was proposed based on the Marx generator. In addition, the gate driver circuit, which supplies power and signals to all the IGBTs simultaneously, was introduced. This providesa superior protection function against the arc and the short. To charge the storage capacitors, a novel 10 kW (10 kV, 1 A) high voltage capacitor charger with the combined advantageof a series-loaded resonant converter and a ZVS (zero-voltage-switching) full-bridge pulse width modulation (PWM) converter was proposed and designed especially for the solid-state pulsed power modulator. Theexperiment results verified that the proposed scheme and structure can be used effectively for a high voltage pulsed power modulator that requires variable voltage, repetition rate, and pulse width, depending on the process of the applications.

No abstract

No abstract

This paper deals with the detailed design of a pulsed power modulator using insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) switches for industrial applications. Output specifications of the proposed modulator are as follows: variable output pulse voltage 1 ∼ 40 kV; pulse width 0.5 ∼ 5 μs; maximum pulse repetition rates 3 kHz, and average output power of 13 kW. The proposed pulsed power modulator consists of a high-voltage capacitor charger based on a high-efficiency resonant inverter and pulse generator part including a series of connected 24 pieces power cells. To verify the proposed design, PSpice modeling was performed. Finally, experimental results proved the reliability and robustness of the proposed solid-state pulsed power modulator.