Self-excitation and energy recovery of air-core compulsators

Zhao, Weiduo; Wu, Shaopeng; Cui, Shumei; Gerada, C.; Zhang, He; Xu, Zhuang

Abstract

As power supplies, compulsators are popular choices for high-end railgun power supplies. In order to increase power and energy density, air-core compulsators are proposed by using composite materials instead of traditional iron-core compulsators. Due to the absence of ferromagnetic material, the flux density in the air-core compulsator can reach to 4–6 T instantaneously, which is much higher than the saturation field strength in traditional iron-core machines. Therefore, self-excitation topology is essential for the air-core compulsator to obtain up to 100-kA field current. This paper carried out research on the key parameters of self-excitation efficiency first, and then focus on the large magnetic energy remained in the inductive field winding after one shot, an implementation scheme and control strategy of energy recovery of air-core compulsator was proposed and analyzed. By controlling the field rectifier working at active inverter state after one discharge process, the magnetic energy stored in the field winding can be converted to rotor kinetic energy again. The simulation results indicate that the energy recovery efficiency can reach to 70% for a reference air-core compulsator. The continuous discharge number of times increased from 3 to 4 during one kinetic energy charging, which means that the delivered energy density increases 33.3%.

Citation

Zhao, W., Wu, S., Cui, S., Gerada, C., Zhang, H., & Xu, Z. (2017). Self-excitation and energy recovery of air-core compulsators. IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, 45(7), 1168-1174. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPS.2017.2700027

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Apr 25, 2017
• Online Publication Date: May 16, 2017
• Publication Date: Jul 1, 2017
• Deposit Date: Jun 30, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 30, 2017
• Journal: IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science
• Print ISSN: 0093-3813
• Electronic ISSN: 1939-9375
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 45
• Issue: 7
• Pages: 1168-1174
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TPS.2017.2700027
• Keywords: Compulsators, Electromagneticlaunch, Energy recovery, Railguns, Self-excitation
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/968229
• Publisher URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7929298/
• Additional Information: © 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.
• Contract Date: Jun 30, 2017