Design, Analysis and Construction of a High Voltage Capacitor Charging Supply; Master's thesis

摘要

The desire to use railguns in defense applications has elevated the level of concentration in all areas of the railgun system. Necessary in any railgun is a large amount of electric power to deliver the required force to the projectile. One popular source of power is high voltage capacitor banks. The NPS railgun Lab employs a fully functioning railgun with capacitor banks as power supplies. A reliable and safe charging supply for these capacitor banks is desirable and investigated in this paper. Construction and testing of a power supply charger is compared to simulation results. The power supply charger consists of a Voltage Source Inverter (VSI) connected to a high voltage boost transformer; the output of the transformer is connected to a voltage doubler rectifier; the output of the rectifier charges the high voltage capacitor to 9 kV in two minutes. The power supply controller is an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) with embedded control to ensure the safe operation of the power supply.