HIGH-REPEATABILITY DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEMS FOR PULSED POWER CONVERTERS

In this book, several issues related to the metrological characterization of high-performance pulsed power converters are addressed. Initially, a background and state-of-the-art on measurement systems for high-performance power converter are presented. Modern power converters usually exploit digital control loops to enhance their performance. In this context the final performance of a power converter has to be validated by a reference instrument with better metrological characteristics. In addition, an on-line measurement system is also needed to digitize the quantity to be controlled with high-accuracy. In industrial applications of power converters metrology, specifications are often given in terms of Worst-Case Uncertainty (WCU). Therefore, an analytical model for predicting the WCU of a measurement system is required. In this book such a model is discussed and detailed for an instrument affected by Gaussian noise. In addition, the study and the design of a Reference Acquisition System for characterizing high-power pulses are presented. Finally, the design of an On-line Acquisition System for controlling the power converter itself is also presented. The book continues with numerical results obtained in simulation for the three main topics (Worst-Case Uncertainty, Reference Acquisition System, and On-line Acquisition System) which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposals. Finally, the experimental results of a case study, carried out in the framework of the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC), a new particle accelerator currently under study at CERN, are reported and compared with simulations in order to obtain the final validation of the proposals. In particular, since CLIC requirements for the measurement systems mostly concern repeatability, and this was proven to be only affected by the instrumental noise under certain assumptions, the two systems were designed to be ultra-low noise and are demonstrated to be repeatable in the order of few tens of parts per million (ppm).