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Università degli Studi di Padova Padua Research Archive - Institutional Repository Solidifying Power Electronics [Historical] Original Citation: Availability: This version is available at: 11577/3271203 since: 2018-06-13T09:33:26Z Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. Published version: DOI: 10.1109/MIE.2018.2791062 Terms of use: Open Access This article is made available under terms and conditions applicable to Open Access Guidelines, as described at http://www.unipd.it/download/file/fid/55401 (Italian only) (Article begins on next page) Historical by Massimo Guarnieri Solidifying Power Electronics Massimo Guarnieri ore than a century ago, in electrochemical plants. The idea of us- 1902, American Engineer ing grid control in combination with M Peter Cooper Hewitt (1861– phase retard to modulate ac power had 1921) derived the mercury-arc recti- emerged in the early 1920s, and, by fier, enclosed in a glass bulb, from his 1925, the name inverter was introduced. mercury-vapor lamp of the previous Fundamental converter topologies ap- year. He devised its use for feeding dc peared during those two decades. New motors from alternating currents. As York City’s underground was dc fed the first rectifier for power uses (two through 3-MW mercury-vapor recti- years before John Ambrose Fleming’s fiers in 1930, and German railways ad- diode and four years before Lee de opted mercury-arc cycloconverters for Forest’s audion [1]), the mercury-arc a universal motor drive in 1931. Such rectifier marked the birth of power power grid applications called for de- electronics. The device was used in vices capable of higher voltages. 1905 in Schenectady, New York, for By 1932, AEG was producing high- powering a dc line for incandescent power (750 kW at 3 kV) mercury-vapor lamps and, soon after, in rectifiers for rectifiers provided with a glass casing battery chargers and electrochemical (Figure 1). GE used similar devices in processes, including aluminum reduc- the 12-kV dc transmission line con- tion and electroplating. Aiming for necting a 40-Hz power station to 60-Hz higher powers, Cooper Hewitt intro- loads at Mechanicville, New York, in duced the metal casing with water 1932 [4]. The device, known as an ig- cooling in 1909. nitron, is a high-current, high-voltage In the same year, the Hungarian en- FIGURE 1 – A large GE thyratron (used in (HV) mercury-vapor controlled rec- gineer Béla B. Schäfer (1879–?), of the pulsed radars) next to a miniature 2D21 tifier developed by Joseph Slepian German company Hartmann & Braun thyratron (used to control relays). (Courtesy of (1891–1969) at Westinghouse in 1931. Wikimedia Commons.) (H&B), applied for his first patent on It has a water-cooled steel casing for mercury-arc rectifiers, which were first withstanding high currents between delivered to a German foundry in 1911. also entered the market in the 1920s, a cathode and an anode, started by a After an agreement between H&B and while the devices’ ratings gradually triggering pulse in the third electrode, the Swiss-owned Brown Boveri Compa- increased [3]. and was used in topologies such as an ny, high-power models (300 kW at 600 Early studies on controlled rectifi- inverse parallel for ac control in welding V) with a metal casing were produced cation in gas tubes were developed and heating and in bridge rectifiers for in 1913 [2]. Steel-tank rectifiers could at GE by Irving Langmuir (1881–1957) supplying railways and mills. Recently, carry 750-A currents by 1915, and and his colleagues in 1914, when they it has been replaced by semiconduc- General Electric (GE) started produc- discovered that a negative potential tor switches, but it is still used in some ing similar devices in 1919; Siemens– introduced between a cathode and an high-power pulsed applications because Schuckert introduced a water-cooled anode by a third electrode prevented of its robustness. model in 1920. Westinghouse and Allge- the anode current. High-power mercu- The device, known as a thyratron, meine Elektricitäts–Gesellschaft (AEG) ry-arc controlled valves, i.e., switches, was first used close to 1928 [5]. It was were developed in the 1920s and 1930s, a hot-cathode mercury-arc controlled Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MIE.2018.2791062 providing significant improvements to valve that was developed by building Date of publication: 21 March 2018 electric railway converter stations and on the argon-filled vacuum tubes used 36 IEEE INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS MAGAZINE ■ MARCH 2018 in radio detectors. It featured an anode, galena cat’s-whisker detectors [8]) with one frequency to the other in operating a heated cathode, and a grid acting as current densities up to 310 mA/cm2 ac motors at variable speed and with the control electrode that could start without a heat sink and limited direct/ transforming high ac voltage to low ac an anode-to-cathode positive current inverse voltages (i.e., lower than 6 V). voltage [10]. and was enclosed in a glass casing However, by 1948, copper-oxide rectifi- The invention of the point-contact filled with mercury vapor to provide ers had grown considerably. Assembled transistor at Bell Labs by John Bard- low direct voltage. It became popular in series and in parallel, they could cov- een and Walter H. Brattain in late 1947, for a number of low-power applica- er a wide range of different applications and the junction transistor by William tions. Uncontrolled diode versions, with currents up to 25–100 kA (recti- B. Shockley in early 1948 [11], opened known as phanotrons, were also pro- fiers for plating) and voltages up to the door to a completely new genera- duced. The first variable-frequency ac 1,500 kV (atomic physics experiments) tion of power devices, starting with drive of a synchronous motor was de- [9]. Building on early observations a controlled semiconductor rectifier. veloped by Ernst Alexanderson (1878– by Braun, William G. Adams, and others After joining Bell Labs in 1951, Jewell 1975) at GE Corporate Research and in 1874–1876, Ernst Presser at TeKaDe, James Ebers (1921–1959) developed Development (GE-CRD) in 1934 using Germany, developed the selenium rec- a model of a p-n-p-n device as the thyratrons [6]. These devices are still tifier in 1928. It consisted of a layer of combination of a p-n-p and an n-p-n used for some high-power (tens of ki- selenium applied to an aluminum plate. transistor. This had to be developed loamps and tens of kilovolts) pulsed Despite operating at a current density as a three-electrode solid-state device operation systems, e.g., lasers, radio- lower than the copper-oxide rectifier, made with four layers of alternating p- therapy devices, and crowbar circuits it was the first solid-state metal diode and n-type semiconductors. Analyses of TV broadcasting stations. suitable for more general power uses, showed that it could act as a bistable After Schäfer sold his know-how to by virtue of rated voltages of up to 30 V. switch conducting between an anode Allmanna Svenka Elektriska Aktiebo- In the 1940s, power electronics dealt and cathode when the gate received a laget [(ASEA), now ABB after merging with the conversion of electric power trigger current and continued to con- with the Brown Boveri Company in from ac to dc (or vice versa) in dc power duct while the voltage across the device 1998] in 1927, an advanced HV mer- transmission, with the conversion from was not reversed (forward biased) [12]. cury-arc valve was made pos- Shockley later claimed he sible by the grading electrode originated the device by reason design invented by Uno Lamm of the hook collector, i.e., the (1904–1989) of ASEA in 1929. It negative resistance effect that allowed HVdc lines operating he interpreted for the transistor, at hundreds of kilovolts to be which also appeared in the p- put into service in subsequent n-p-n switch. The construction decades. Multianode devices of the p-n-p-n switch was under- for multiphase operations, taken by a Bell Labs group led with both steel and glass cas- by John L. Moll (1921–2011), who ings, were available in the late argued in favor of using silicon 1930s (Figure 2). technology to make the device Early power solid-state instead of germanium, as was rectifiers appeared during this customary in the transistors of era. Grondahl [7] and his co- the day. The first silicon transis- workers at Union Switch and Sig- tor was made by Morris Tanen- nal Company had studied the baum (b. 1928) at Bell Labs in conduction between copper January 1954. After Moll’s group and copper oxide since 1920, es- had been reinforced by James tablishing the basis of metallic M. Goldey (b. 1926) and Nick rectifiers. They obtained early Holonyak (b. 1928), prototypes practical devices four years of the p-n-p-n switch were built later and patented the solid- by Tanenbaum, Goldey, and Ho- oxide rectifier in 1927. Thanks lonyak in 1954–1955, all based to planar geometry, it could on silicon. withstand relatively high cur- Bell Labs did not arrive at rents (i.e., 7 A, much higher than an industrialized design; rath- the solid-state galena contact er, the GE rectifier department point rectifier introduced by under the supervision of R.A. FIGURE 2 – A multianode mercury-arc rectifier still in operation Karl F. Braun in 1874 and devel- in October 2010 at Manx Electric Railway substation at the Laxey York started a program in 1957 oped some years later in the Isle of Man. (Image courtesy of Tony S. at Talk Electrician Forum.) to build a silicon-controlled MARCH 2018 ■ IEEE INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS MAGAZINE 37 rectifier (SCR) that was actually a Bell Labs Engineer Sidney Darlington three-terminal p-n-p-n switch [13].