Study on thyristor control and diagnosis system for pulsed-power application

This paper focuses on the design and implementation of a thyristor control and diagnosis system for a large-capacity intermittent converter. FPGA and DSP based controller is adopted to meet the demanding requirements of this pulsed-power application. DSP deals with data processing and communication tasks. FPGA carries out real-time thyristor control based on converter status and DSP control orders. Trigger boards execute FPGA control orders to trigger thyristors. Detailed information, such as thyristor status, fuse status, thyristor temperature, line current, DC voltage, etc., is continuously analyzed for device failure and critical faults are reported immediately. An operator friendly PC-based front end is designed to display and evaluate the operation status data of the thyristor converter; it also acts as the top-level controller of the pulsed power system.