Gate Driving Complexity Reduction of an H- Bridge Connected Silicon Controlled Rectifier

One of the key challenges in power converter design is to reduce the gate driving components (opto-coupler) as well as the driving complexity of the switches used in the implementation without disrupting advantageous features of the converter. To demonstrate an alternative way, a modified gate driving technique is proposed in this paper for AC-DC and AC-AC converter when silicon controlled rectifier (SCR) is used as a switch in bridge connected topology. The proposed driving technique facilitates number of gate driving components count reduction of the existing bridge connected SCR topology. The proposed driving technique also reduces the driving complexity as well as the complexity of the pulse generation algorithm for microcontroller or microprocessor. The proposed driving technique is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink environment. A voltage down laboratory prototype is also built to analyses the experimental validation and test the feasibility of the proposed technique.