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Registered Member #347
Joined: Sat Mar 25 2006, 08:26AM
Location: Vancouver, Canada
Posts: 106
The limiter is currently set to 800A, and was being hit quite often during the high power run. I could probably turn it up, the primary cap is safe voltage wise up to about 1.1kA.
Registered Member #347
Joined: Sat Mar 25 2006, 08:26AM
Location: Vancouver, Canada
Posts: 106
The coil was running on 120V with the active PFC when pegging the meter. The wiring run was quite long, about 30m 14AWG total from the panel to the coil. Maybe the draw would have been lower if the line voltage stayed high. With a burst length 1 primary cycle shorter, the draw was about 14A.
I wanted to use a relay for the bus discharge, but I initially discounted it because of the universal input voltage. Actually, now that I think about it, the relay coil could run off the switchmode AC adapter powering the control board.
Registered Member #1232
Joined: Wed Jan 16 2008, 10:53PM
Location: Doon tha Toon!
Posts: 881
Thanks for the info. 6ft sparks for 1800watt input sounds like very good performance! Do you know what the spark repetition rate was during those runs?
Regarding the discharge relay, you might be able to power it off an auxilliary winding consisting of a few turns around the core of the boost inductor in the active PFC. If you use a full-wave voltage doubler rectifier it will output a DC voltage which is proportional to the boost voltage at the output of the active PFC converter. Since the boost output is semi-regulated to say 380V, then your auxilliary supply can also be semi-regulated to say 12V for a relay. The active PFC controller chip itself along with cooling fans etc are often powered this way.
The only problem with this might be that the inrush current limiting bits of the supply will also get hit with the inrush to the lamps before the PFC converter starts up, opens the relay and disconnects the lamps.
If it was me, I would replace the lamps and the relay with a few paralleled high-wattage resistors connected directly across the DC bus caps. Relays can fail to operate and filament lamps have been known to fail open circuit, so I'd want something more reliable as a safety device.
Registered Member #639
Joined: Wed Apr 11 2007, 09:09PM
Location: The Netherlands, Herkenbosch
Posts: 512
GeordieBoy wrote ...
If it was me, I would replace the lamps and the relay with a few paralleled high-wattage resistors connected directly across the DC bus caps. Relays can fail to operate and filament lamps have been known to fail open circuit, so I'd want something more reliable as a safety device.
-Richie,
I always use a really, they almost never fail and just in case it fails there's a high brightness LED to indicate that there is still energy stored in the capacitor. This way you don't need huge resistors
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