TY - JOUR
T1 - A transition arm modular multilevel universal pulse-waveform generator for electroporation applications
AU - Elgenedy, Mohamed A.
AU - Badawy, Ahmed
AU - Ahmed, Shehab
AU - Williams, Barry W.
N1 - © 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
PY - 2017/1/16
Y1 - 2017/1/16
N2 - High voltage (HV) pulses are used in electroporation to subject pulsed electric field (PEF) onto a sample under treatment. Pulse-waveform shape, voltage magnitude, pulse duration, and pulse repetition rate are the basic controllable variables required for particular PEF application. In practice, a custom-made pulse generator is dedicated for each PEF application with limited flexibility in changing these variables. In this paper, a universal pulse-waveform generator (UPG) is proposed, where the controller software-algorithm can manipulate a basic generated multilevel pulse-waveform to emulate many different PEF pulse-waveforms. The commonly used PEF HV pulse-waveforms can be generated as bipolar or monopolar with controllable pulse durations, repetition times, and voltage magnitudes. The UPG has the ability to generate multilevel pulses that have controllable dv/dt which allow reduction of the electromagnetic interference (EMI) generated by the converter. The UPG topology is based on half-bridge modular multilevel converter (HB-MMC) cells forming two transition arms in conjunction with two bi-state arms, together creating an H-bridge. The HB-MMC cell-capacitors provide a controllable energy source which charge from the dc input supply and discharge across the load, while the two bi-state arms allow charging the HB-MMC cell-capacitors. Hence, the UPG topology offers modularity, redundancy, and scalability. The HB-MMC individual cell-capacitance is low and the cell-voltages are balanced by employing the sorting and rotating algorithm used in conventional HB-MMC topologies for HVDC transmission applications. The viability of the proposed UPG converter is validated by MATLAB/Simulink simulation and scaled-down experimentation.
AB - High voltage (HV) pulses are used in electroporation to subject pulsed electric field (PEF) onto a sample under treatment. Pulse-waveform shape, voltage magnitude, pulse duration, and pulse repetition rate are the basic controllable variables required for particular PEF application. In practice, a custom-made pulse generator is dedicated for each PEF application with limited flexibility in changing these variables. In this paper, a universal pulse-waveform generator (UPG) is proposed, where the controller software-algorithm can manipulate a basic generated multilevel pulse-waveform to emulate many different PEF pulse-waveforms. The commonly used PEF HV pulse-waveforms can be generated as bipolar or monopolar with controllable pulse durations, repetition times, and voltage magnitudes. The UPG has the ability to generate multilevel pulses that have controllable dv/dt which allow reduction of the electromagnetic interference (EMI) generated by the converter. The UPG topology is based on half-bridge modular multilevel converter (HB-MMC) cells forming two transition arms in conjunction with two bi-state arms, together creating an H-bridge. The HB-MMC cell-capacitors provide a controllable energy source which charge from the dc input supply and discharge across the load, while the two bi-state arms allow charging the HB-MMC cell-capacitors. Hence, the UPG topology offers modularity, redundancy, and scalability. The HB-MMC individual cell-capacitance is low and the cell-voltages are balanced by employing the sorting and rotating algorithm used in conventional HB-MMC topologies for HVDC transmission applications. The viability of the proposed UPG converter is validated by MATLAB/Simulink simulation and scaled-down experimentation.
KW - MMC
KW - power electronic converter
KW - pulse power systems
KW - electroporation
KW - high voltage
KW - modular multilevel converters
KW - transition arm
KW - pulsed electric fields
KW - pulse-waveforms generator
KW - series connected IGBTs
UR - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=63
U2 - 10.1109/TPEL.2017.2653243
DO - 10.1109/TPEL.2017.2653243
M3 - Article
SP - 1
EP - 13
JO - IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics
JF - IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics
SN - 0885-8993
ER -