Research on short-circuit discharge characteristics of capacitive circuits based on safety spark test apparatus

Abstract

Based on the safety spark test apparatus, the short-circuit spark discharge (SCSD) characteristics of the simple capacitive circuit and switching converter are studied. It is pointed out that their SCSD process can be divided into four stages, that is, dielectric-breakdown stage, spark-generated stage, spark-maintenance stage, and spark-extinguish stage; moreover, there is different equivalent spark resistance in each stage. For the simple capacitive circuit, its spark resistance is larger and maintaining voltage is almost unchanged in the spark-maintenance stage. For the switching converter, its output short-circuit characteristics depend strongly on the load resistance and its maintaining voltage reduces rapidly with the decrease of the load resistance. The circuit model is proposed, which can simulate the output SCSD process of the switching converter. By using the least-squares method, the relationship expressions between the discharge duration and capacitance in each time-stage are derived and the corresponding equivalent resistance is obtained. The mathematical models are established, and the expressions of the discharge current and voltage are deduced. Experiment and simulation results are positive in the analysis showing the feasibility of the proposed models. © 2014 Shulin Liu and Yongxiu Zhao.