Hideo Okayama

A new regenerative snubber circuit for large-capacity three-level GTO inverter systems

Increase in the capacity of GTOs has made remarkable progress in recent years. At present, 4.5-kV, 4.0-kA GTOs are commercially available, and 6.0-kV, 6.0-kA GTOs made from 6-inch silicon wafers are appearing. The 6-inch GTOs will be applied to our three-level GTO inverter system. In order to apply GTOs to voltage-source inverters, snubber circuits are necessary for limiting on the turn-on di/dt and turn-off dv/dt. To realize high efficiency of the system, regenerative snubber circuits are often applied. A conventional circuit applied to three-level GTO inverters had the problem of long paths created for snubber circuits of the inner GTOs. Another circuit using a current transformer for recovering the energy trapped in the snubber circuits of the inner GTOs has been presented. In this paper, a new regenerative snubber circuit is proposed, which is more suitable for three-level GTO inverter systems with many phase-legs. By applying the snubber circuit, all snubber energy generated by each GTO switching can be regenerated to the dc link. In addition, high current turn-off performance of both the inner and the outer GTOs is verified by several successful experimental results using 6-inch 6.0-kV, 6.0-kA GTOs.