A fundamental approach to applying an insulated-gate bipolar transistor to current interruption in a low-voltage direct current delivery system

A fundamental approach to apply an insulated gate bipolar transistor to a current interruption technique in a low-voltage direct current (DC) power delivery system is described. By considering the dependence of collector-emitter resistance on the gate-emitter voltage, a circuit configuration of circuit-breaker components was contrived to operate a DC interruption. Based on this design, a model DC circuit breaker composed of an insulated gate bipolar transistor was constructed to verify the interrupting performance of various DCs I-DC under different source voltages E-DC. The experimental results demonstrate that the model circuit breaker successfully decreased the instantaneous current to zero over an elapsed time and then interrupted the current. In addition, the results show that the current-interrupting time was almost constant against higher I-DC and E-DC. The results also verify that by adjusting the time constant of the gate-emitter voltage, the current-interrupting time could be controlled. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.