Design and analysis of an LCC resonant converter for xenon flash lamp simmer circuit

This paper presents a 2.5-kW (500 V/5 A) simmer circuit for a xenon flash lamp driver. The simmer circuit is based on an LCC resonant converter to take advantage of minimal arc energy from the current source characteristic. The output under no load condition was analyzed. The converter minimizes filter size with high switching frequency through the use of zero-voltage switching and SiC power devices. A gate driver with variable dead time to assist soft switching was designed. The design criteria of variable dead time implemented through a simple RC circuit are presented. A PSpice simulation was performed to verify the parameter design. The simmer circuit was implemented based on the designed LCC converter. The circuit was tested at a resistive load under rated conditions (500 V/5 A) and open condition (1400 V/0 A). The Xenon flash lamp driver was implemented using the developed simmer circuit and trigger circuit. The prototype was tested to maintain the lamp under various simmering current conditions. The influence of the arc energy on the reliability of the triggering operation was proven by comparing the waveform for filter capacitor values. The experimental results verify that the designed circuit can be effectively used for simmering xenon flash lamps.