Everything Else

I was struggling to realize an engine that needs 40 Ampere, I was thinking that 40A were strong enough for a poor IGBT when I met a dude on the freenote: he works for CERN, he said that, from their point of view, this IGBT is for "low power" equipments.

It's 2500 Ampere 1200 Volt , my universe has warped, cracking up, I need a pill X________X

I suppose it is all relative! If the guy from CERN thinks that a 2.5kA/1.2kV transistor is a low power device, Id hate to see his idea of a high powered IGBT

40A, almost any old power MOSFET in a to220 can handle for less than a couple dollars. Why would you want an IGBT instead?
Example, don't know your voltage requirement, but here's one: http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Int ... ItTQ%3d%3d

The IGBT is a cross between the bipolar and MOSFET transistors, it has the output switching and conduction characteristics of a bipolar transistor but is voltage-controlled like a MOSFET: I like it

Also, the IGBT technology is certainly the device of choice for breakdown voltages above 1000V, while the MOSFET is certainly the device of choice for device breakdown voltages below 250V.

I was toying with the motor of a washing machine. It has strong breakdown voltages, so I'd better use IGBT.

We used, or rather tried to use, IGBTs to trigger a power source that was 5 parallel banks of 70 optima redtop batteries in series (350 batteries total), into an equivalent load of 1 ohm. Didn't work too good. There were a lot of flames and smoke...

vishnu wrote: We used, or rather tried to use, IGBTs to trigger a power source that was 5 parallel banks of 70 optima redtop batteries in series (350 batteries total), into an equivalent load of 1 ohm. Didn't work too good. There were a lot of flames and smoke...

Thats awesome! But I need to ask...what in the world was this power bank for! How were they wired exactly? 70 in series x 5, then each bank in parallel? Or 70 in parallel x5, then each bank in series?
Roughly about 840Vdc @ 3750A? Or roughly 48Vdc @ 52.5kA? Is my math correct, I've had a few beers today.

70 batteries in series, with a relay between each ten, around 900 volts because they were Optima Redtops which fully charged are 13.1 volts. We had five of those that we put in parallel, so we could dump each of the five into a single load, which was this launcher. The load was an ESR of about an ohm so each bank dumped about a kiloamp into the load, five kiloamps through the load in total. Each of the five banks was switched into the load with an IGBT, and the output of each bank had a big flyback diode in series to keep the banks from trying to dump into each other if their output voltages didn't match. We tried to keep the banks charged with a 1000 volt power supply, which taught me some very hard lessons about series charging multiple batteries, which is to say, you can't do it! Maybe if you had two or three batteries which were all in an exact same condition of charge and sulfation, but 70 batteries? No way, it can't be done. You get one or two bad apples in there and they dump waaaaaay more than their share of the voltage, now you're cooking the sons of bitches so I would go up and down the lines with a battery tester and if one had more than 16 volts across it I would slap that thing on there and suck a few hundred amps from it for four or five seconds to knock it back in line, it was a crazy ass game of whack a mole and though it worked obviously it was completely impractical as a long term maintenance solution.

I also built up a kick ass desulfator that would dump 50 amp pulses at a five percent duty cycle at a thousand hertz, I found I could recover fully discharged Redtops, which is to say, Redtops that were down below a volt, in about 24 hours with that thing. The problem with commercial desufators is they're too wimpy, you've got to hit a sick battery hard if you want to recover it in less than a month...

Ahahaha! Thats just sick!

Bear with me, Im not an electrical engineer, but know enough to get me by and in trouble. With that kind of voltage and amperage, why not just use a large capacitor bank? Wouldn't that be easier and more efficient? Think in terms of something like a rail gun.