Over-current and short-circuit protection for IGBT's used in plasma generator inverter

The protection of the IGBT's in the case of an over-current or a short-circuit, respects the general methodology of a power electronic device protection. Usually, every power device is protected by its driver, which becomes a multifunctional circuit capable of assuring the driving signal, monitoring the operation state as well as providing its protection. In this paper we propose and realize a protection driver based on monitoring the collector-to-emitter IGBT's voltage. The driver is simulated in OrCAD PSpice and the practical implementation is used as a laboratory setup in the educational field. In this way the students can simulate and test the operation principle of an intelligent gate driver. The application is original and suitable for plasma generator inverters, because the system has to ensure minimum voltage to maintain the plasma on the active electrode, under extreme load conditions: "all" or "nothing".