Design, analysis and construction of a high voltage capacitor charging supply

Abstract

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.