TIDUEZ9B July 2022 – April 2023
For the isolated current measurement, a current transformer (CT) is used. This approach has two advantages. First, it provides the necessary isolation from the high DC link voltages and second, it filters out the DC component of the current, which is not of interest for the arc detection. An important point is to consider the saturation behavior of the CT for the high DC current of up to 10 A. To interface the voltage drop on the burden resistor to the voltage level of the filter stage and ADC a first gain stage is implemented, which also introduces a bias to signal to convert the CT output into a unipolar signal. Since the switching frequency of the inverter typically lies inside the pass band of the CT, the gain of this first amplification stage has to be adjusted in a way that the ripple current does not drive the amplifier stage into saturation.