Practical Design of a High-Voltage Pulsed Power Supply Implementing SiC Technology for Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Reactors

Abstract

Non-thermal plasma reactors offer numerous advantages and are used in a wide variety of applications. Exemplary fields of use include exhaust gas or water quality improvement, surface processing, agriculture, or medical processes. Two of the most popular discharge chamber constructions are dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) and pulsed corona discharge (PCD, barrierless) plasma reactors. Various power supply constructions are presented in the literature with varying complexity and operating principles. A simple, power electronic, pulsed power supply construction is presented in this work, implementing resonant power switch operation, modern silicon carbide (SiC) power semiconductors and a Tesla coil-like transformer design. The power supply construction is immune to short circuits in the reactor and can be used for both types of reactor constructions. The principles of operation, simulation results, and prototype test verifications are presented with main power supply characteristics.