A Reopened Crowbar Protection for Increasing the Resiliency of the Vacuum Tube High-Voltage DC Power Supply Against the Vacuum Arc

High-voltage power supplies (HVPSs) are widely used to supply vacuum tubes. The amount of delivered energy from the HVPS to the tube is an important issue during the vacuum arc in the tube. The conventional protection mechanism consists of a shunt crowbar which diverts the fault current from the tube to itself as a parallel path. The crowbar circuit is usually built of the devices without the turn-off capability. It is a drawback since the output of the power supply is shortened for a long time. Thus, the restoration time of these power supplies is excessive. This demerit can have detrimental effects on mission-critical applications. In this paper, the insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT)-based crowbar structure is studied to overcome this issue. In the proposed protection mechanism, the crowbar can be reopened intentionally after closing. A theoretical analysis is presented to compare power supply performance in the presence of the conventional crowbar with the IGBT-based crowbar. The experimental results are presented to demonstrate the practical considerations of the proposed crowbar structure and its appropriate performance. This paper shows that HVPS has more fault resiliency and less restoration time with the proposed IGBT-based crowbar.

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