Development of 60kV Pulse Power Generator Based on IGBT Stacks for Wide Application

In this paper, a novel new pulse power generator based on IGBT stacks is proposed for pulse power application. The proposed scheme consists of series connected 9 power stages to generate maximum 60 kV output pulse and one series resonant power inverter to charge DC capacitor voltage. Each power stage is configured as 8 series connected power cells and each power cell generates up to 850 V DC pulse. Finally pulse output voltage is applied using a total of 72 series connected IGBTs. The synchronization of gating signal is important for series operation of IGBTs. For gating signal synchronization, a full bridge inverter and a pulse transformer generates on-off signals of IGBT gating and specially designed gate power circuit was used. The proposed scheme has lots of advantages such as long lifecyle, compact size, flat topped pulse forming, small weight, protection for arc, high efficiency, and flexibility to generate various kinds of pulse output. The operation of proposed pulse power supply was tested for PSII application and is confirmed that the proposed scheme can effectively be used for wide pulse power applications