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Weh hey!!.....i found the fault, It turned out to be faulty driver ic's UCC37321, both turned out to be faulty! Now i have 3 inch spark at 35 volt buss voltage,
Did you ever run it with the chip's output open loaded? Those darn chips always liked to burn up on me too. If they have no load on the output, they osscilate or go crazy and fry...
Registered Member #146
Joined: Sun Feb 12 2006, 04:21AM
Location: Austin Tx
Posts: 1055
It seems those gate drivers dont have the best clamping diodes, ive had some "mysteriously" fail on me before, but it was usually when the design was new and i was changing stuff a lot. I havent had one fail on any of my coils that are running normally now.
Its always good to at least attempt to figure out why something fails, rather than just stuff new parts in. I can think of some people who have that mentality... its pretty sad how much stuff they destroy.
Gate drive chips are made to be as "hot" as possible. Maximum current in as little as time as they dare. Thus the "poles and zeros" are tight and designed for a "load". Nobody drives an open load so they don't "dumb down" the chips to handle open load. So if you drive power into an open load, the chip will die figuring out "how"... No big deal though...
We may kill a few here and there as we experiment, but in the actual application which uses 99.9% of the 100's of thousands used per day, there is no issue at all...
If the chip was run open, all is expalined right there... It's just a fleck of sand after all
Registered Member #154
Joined: Sun Feb 12 2006, 04:28PM
Location: Westmidlands, UK
Posts: 260
Yes i did run the driver without a load (CT ) when i was first testing its start up waveforms, so, the UCC ic's don't like it without a load? Perhaps thats the reason they failed? I also found a dry jointed clamping diode connected from the UCC output and the 15 volt rail.
Registered Member #30
Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706
Glad you found the fault Bennem!
Terry: I've run the UCC driver chips in my DRSSTC drivers open-circuit for hours, and never had any problems. I don't think running without a load should do them any harm. There were only two times I ever killed any:
When I ran them without clamp diodes and they latched up. They survived that if I turned the power supply off quickly. >.<
When the power supply that I was running them off went crazy due to RF pickup from the Tesla coil, and increased its output voltage to more than the chips are rated to take.
Registered Member #15
Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 01:11PM
Location:
Posts: 3068
wrote ...
Terry: I've run the UCC driver chips in my DRSSTC drivers open-circuit for hours, and never had any problems. I don't think running without a load should do them any harm. There were only two times I ever killed any:
I have to agree with Steve on this one. I run these drivers open circuit (no load) all the time for testing and never have any problems. Sometimes if you don't have a good tantalum (10uF for example) to bypass the chips, they will oscillate, but other than that, I've never seen one fail on the bench no load.
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