Development of a High-Voltage Pulsed Electric Field Sterilization Power Supply Using a New Topology Circuit

Abstract

Traditional thermal sterilization technology is easy to implement and safe, but it will destroy food nutrition and change food taste. Therefore, people began to turn their attention to non-thermal sterilization. High-voltage pulsed electric field sterilization technology is one of them; it has attracted much attention because of its high efficiency and little damage to food. Different types of loads will cause serious trailing of the pulse falling edge. In view of this situation, this paper proposes a new topology circuit that combines a solid-state switch with a half-bridge Marx generator. It can be used for high-voltage pulsed electric field sterilization. By improving the structure of the classical Marx circuit, the high-voltage pulse power supply of the new topology circuit has the characteristics of steep rising edge and short falling edge delay; does not require isolation inductance or isolation resistance, which solves the isolation problem between the DC charging power supply and the high-voltage terminal; and has a good voltage-clamping function and load adaptability. The working process of the topology circuit under resistive, capacitive and inductive loads and the voltage clamping effect when the solid-state switch does not work properly in the discharge process are analyzed in detail. The power supply is composed of an adjustable DC power supply, five-stage half-bridge Marx generator and control protection circuit. A field programmable gate array (FPGA) is used as the controller to generate control signals, and optical fiber isolation is used to provide control signals for the main loop. The power supply can output a high-voltage square wave pulse with a voltage amplitude of 10 kV, maximum pulse number of 1000 per second, maximum pulse width of 20 μs, pulse rise time of smaller than 300 ns and short pulse drop time, and the repeated voltage amplitude, frequency and pulse width are adjustable, which can meet the requirements of a high-voltage pulse sterilization experiment.