Design of High Voltage Full-Bridge Inverter Using Marx Derived Switches

This paper presents a high-voltage (HV) inverter to generate bipolar voltages with variable duty-cycle and frequency for HV pulsed power or HV electrical network applications. Each one of the four HV inverter switches is built with a series stack of semiconductor devices, derived from the Marx generator concept, using small capacitors to equally share the voltage among the individual series stacked semiconductors. A sliding mode control is used to control the output voltage and a delay technique is used to reduce dU/dt at the HV inverter output and to balance the capacitor voltages. The design and structure of the HV inverter switches is described together with the delay technique. Steady-state and dynamic behavior is evaluated. Simulation results are presented (using MATLAB/Simulink software) and discussed.