Research on a sequentially fired 24MJ EML system

Electromagnetic launch technology is intended to convert electric energy into armature's kinetic energy. To make the armature accelerated smoothly, PFN (pulse forming network) needs to generate a flattop wave by triggered sequentially. The thyristor in PFN is easy damaged under this condition. The thyristor's reverse recovery process is the critical reason for its damage. The paper expounds the thyristor's reverse recovery process and builds a macro model of thyristor describing this process. The thyristor damage reason when triggered in sequence is proposed by theoretical analysis. Assessment about the possibility of increasing the inductance to protect the thyristor has been made. The PSPICE model of a 24MJ EML (electromagnetic launch) system which is made up of PFN model and simplified barrel model is built. After increasing the inductance, the integral performance of the 24MJ EML system is evaluated. The result shows that the properly increasing of inductance can protect the thyristor effectively, and the efficiency of EML system will not significantly decrease at the meantime.