AC "Back to Back" Switching Protection in Inductive Application

In industrial applications the same electronic device manufactured by several semiconductor devices such as Silicon-Controlled Rectifier (SCR) are often used to manage and protect different applications. Therefore, it is particularly important to design the control systems to have the possibility to operate with different electrical loads without changing in hardware and/or software topologies. This paper introduces and evaluates two different commonly used driving systems for SCR application. Here three aspects; driver system losses, conduction delay on the load voltage and some power quality indices, are taken into consideration. Driver system with optoisolator and driver system based on impulse transformer are compared, based on simulation study and laboratory test results.