Rapid capacitor charger and battery system for portable pulsed power applications

The design of a scalable, burst-mode rapid capacitor charger and a high power battery system will be discussed. The design is scalable up to 40 kW output power and operates at 50 k V. The system is powered by a Lithium Ion Polymer (LiPo) battery pack and includes a battery management system. The topology is derived from a 5 kV, 3 kJ/s battery power capacitor charger that was previously demonstrated. This smaller charger occupied a volume of 1.5 L including batteries and demonstrated a 2 kW/L average power density over a 1 s burst. This power density is five to ten times higher than commercially available systems. The performance of this previous design was limited by strict form factor restrictions (1.5 L, 6" diameter). The new design is intended to match or exceed the power density of the previous design due to reduced form factor restrictions. Electrical and mechanical design, component selection, and circuit simulations will be presented.