An Inverter-Fed Cockcroft-Walton Multiplier Based High Voltage DC Source for Tokamak

Abstract

Small-sized tokamaks use capacitor banks as pulsed power sources. These capacitor banks are charged at high voltages repeatedly. The requirement of the pulse power source is that it should be regulated and available for repeated operation in a couple of minutes. The work aims at the indigenous development of such a system that in addition to meeting these requirements should also be compact and cost-effective. Capacitor diode voltage multipliers (CDVM) offer cost-effective and compact solutions however they suffer from high internal voltage drops and are not suited for the generation of high voltages at low frequencies. This paper presents a comparative analysis and evaluation of capacitor diode voltage multipliers topologies in simulations. An inverter-fed CWVM is proposed to overcome these limitations, the proposed design is evaluated in simulations using real values of the circuit components. Moreover, its hardware is developed and tested in Lab. The developed system successfully generates the required output voltage of 10kV. This setup will be used to charge the load capacitors that will meet the requirements of the pulsed power source for tokamak.