Reliability Analysis of High Voltage Diode Bridge Rectifiers To Achieve Fault Tolerance

High voltage power supplies (HVPS) are widely used to supply the vacuum tubes. The reliability of HVPS is very important in this application. Since any failure in HVPS leads to downtime in the operation of the vacuum tube. A commonly used part of HVPS is a high voltage diode bridge rectifier. The method for increasing the reliability of the rectifier unit is using redundant modules. If a fault occurs in a rectifier, it is replaced by its redundant module. There are two conventional fused structures for the fault-tolerant operation of the high voltage diode rectifier. However, they are not studied from the aspect of reliability to select the superior one. In this paper, these structure reliability performance is evaluated using Markov Chain method to demonstrate the diode-fuse configuration which outdoes the other configuration from the reliability aspect.