Progress and circuit breaker tripped

[profdc9]

Hello,

I have upgraded my DRSSTC to 180 nF primary capacitance, and now I have a full bridge with each leg having 2 FGH60N60SMD using the full bridge design I put in the DRSSTC pack, so now there are 8 total FGH60N60SMD.   I set the overcurrent to 530 A.   Here are the results:

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I also recorded it at 120 fps so you can view it in slow mo:

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I am throwing the breaker when I turn it up to a really high BPS.  I wonder if this means if I am reaching the limit I can draw from that circuit, or if the power factor or other effects such as EMI are causing the breaker to trip.  At any rate, it's coming along.  This is using the UD2.7C thru-hole design.   When does the breaker usually trip with a DRSSTC?

Dan

[Mads Barnkob]

Great results and still a very not-so-ear-friendly tone you are running it at, turn that BPS down and tune it better instead!

I love the slow motion video and hope I will soon get a chance to film some 1000 FPS videos myself.

High BPS = higher current draw and you are simply tripping from pulling too much power and it properly trips on heat and the bad PF does not help either, get a input filter choke from some old industrial equipment, that will give you a little.

[profdc9]

I am not sure what is going on with the high BPS.  I have tuned the primary as best I can I think, moving around the tap point a bit.  I wonder if the overcurrent is tripping at a lower current than predicted, though its risky to increase it.  I do not have my driver PCB in a box yet; perhaps the stray fields from the tesla coil are causing the overcurrent to trip early.   I have ordered a metal box for my driver PCB, but haven't received it yet.  I put small common-mode chokes on the transformers connected to the PCB, as well as the power input to the board, but that doesn't seem to help.  I have to run the coil with the overcurrent tripping all the time to get this much power.  Perhaps there is something else I've overlooked?

Dan

[Hydron]

Coils that size normally run down at a few hundred BPS max - I am not surprised that it's tripping the breaker!

Looks impressive though, and seems that the baby IGBTs are handling a lot of power.

As Mads said, if you want to avoid breaker trips then try to turn down the BPS - you should be able to get similar length sparks with less power. Another thing to play with is to make a controller that runs in "burst" mode - i.e. a short burst of high BPS then a pause, which will keep average power down (I have never gotten around to doing this myself though!). I have had 230V/20A breakers trip with my larger coil, especially when playing MIDI (which often gives high BPS when multiple or high-pitched notes are playing). The power factor of a non-PFC rectifier is also pretty bad which doesn't help.