Silicon carbide power processing unit for Hall effect thrusters

Author

Reese, Bradley ; McPherson, Brice ; Schupbach, Marcelo ; Lostetter, Alex

Author_Institution

Arkansas Power Electron. Int., Inc., Fayetteville, AR, USA

fYear

2012

fDate

3-10 March 2012

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

6

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a high efficiency, rad-hard 3.8 kW silicon carbide (SiC) based power processing unit (PPU) power supply for the High Voltage Hall Accelerator (HiVHAC) Hall effect thruster. The power converter utilizes SiC JFET power switches which have on-resistance an order of magnitude smaller than equivalent 600V rad-hard silicon MOSFETs. A prototype PPU power converter was developed which was able to achieve up to 700 V output voltage, 1.3 kW output power, 2.55 kW/kg gravimetric power density, and up to 92% efficiency. The converter operates on 80-160 V input and can dynamically control the output voltage between 200-700 V.

Keywords

Hall effect; MOSFET; field effect transistor switches; power convertors; silicon compounds; wide band gap semiconductors; Hall effect thrusters; HiVHAC Hall effect thruster; SiC; SiC JFET power switches; high voltage Hall accelerator; power 3.8 kW; power converter; power processing unit; rad-hard silicon MOSFET; rad-hard silicon carbide; voltage 600 V; Inductors; Logic gates; Magnetic cores; Prototypes; Silicon carbide; Switches; Topology;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Aerospace Conference, 2012 IEEE

Conference_Location

Big Sky, MT

ISSN

1095-323X

Print_ISBN

978-1-4577-0556-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/AERO.2012.6187244

Filename

6187244