Power Converters for Power-Ultrasonic Transducers

Conference: UPEC 2011 - 46th International Universities' Power Engineering Conference
09/05/2011 - 09/08/2011 at Soest, Germany

Proceedings: UPEC 2011

Pages: 6Language: englishTyp: PDF

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Authors:
Wang, Ying; Robinson, Francis; Shepherd, Peter (University of Bath, UK)
Draper, Mike; Denley, Simon (Sonic Systems Ltd, UK)

Abstract:
High-performance power-converters in the form of single-tone class-D amplifiers are required to drive power-ultrasonic transducers in industrial applications. These must produce low-distortion, variable-frequency, and variable-amplitude sinusoidal currents to efficiently drive the piezoelectric cell and horn of transducers, and thereby vibrate materialprocessing stages. A resonant-tracking control strategy is generally used to efficiently couple and regulate output power delivery at a high-Q probe-system resonant mode. This paper reviews a number of power-converter control options suitable for such probe drivers, including quasi-squarewave (QS), naturally sampling pulse width modulation (PWM) and programmed PWM (PPWM). Typical output-waveform quality and the PSPICE models of the power-converter and piezoelectric transducer developed to assess and compare methods are presented.