Design and Experimental Verification of Simple Driver Circuit for Bi-directional Switches used in Matrix Converter

In this paper, a new gate drive circuit for the matrix converter is proposed and three-phase to single-phase matrix converter is experimentally implemented based on TMS320F240 control using this gate drive which consists of one opto coupler and one modified IR2110. Conventional gate drive requires pulse transformer and two IRFD110.These drawbacks are not square for wide range of duty cycles due to problem in pulse transformer which makes difficult in volt-second balance. However, it does not require the use of isolated power supply for each drive signal is the main feature of this circuit. Proposed gate drive can operate with wide range of duty cycles, no noise immunity problems, less gate drive loss and relatively less cost even though an individual isolated power supply is required. Experimental results are obtained from 0.5 kW, 240 V and 2.5 A matrix converter to confirm the gate drive performance