Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
Yet another spot welder circuit
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Virus:
I'm making my own attempt at a welding machine, as importing alternatives such as KWeld are really expensive because of customs and shipping, I have some supercaps lying around and I feel like taking this as an instance to learn about power electronics.
I made an iteration of the circuit on a perfboard and it came out to be a really good MOSFET destroyer. So I decided to tidy up my circuit and make a PCB out of it.
I used four IRFB7430s as MOSFETs and MCP1407 as drivers.
After redesigning the circuit, the power electronics portion of it looks like this.
Which measures do I have to take to make sure my MOSFETs are not going to blow again?
texaspyro:
Use only one gate driver for all the MOSFETs.   Match the FETs for gate threshold voltage.   Beware of too fast of a gate driver... high dI/dT can be a problem.  5V weld voltage is too low for most usable welds.

Also, no matter what you do, expect to kill a lot of FETs getting this thing to work.   
Virus:
>5V weld voltage is too low for most usable welds
However, the ESR of the capacitors is a factor and if I switch the arrangement from a 5S2P, ESR will make the maximum current to be something less than 600A rather than the 1300A that the current arrangement is capable to deliver for welding surface resistance equal to zero. Is it still a good option to change the arrangement of the capacitors?
As for the MOSFET drivers, if I use only one MCP there should not be much trouble as it's a monostable and not another demanding kind of application that requires frequent charge and discharge such as a waveform amplifier. Still, the input capacitance of each of these MOSFETs is quite high (14,000pF) and I'm afraid MOSFETs get hot in that active period of time, but if slowing things down helps to avoid the effect of layout hidden inductances, I'll gladly do that.
Is there a thumb rule to check inductive transients in such circuits? Sorry for the dumb questions.
texaspyro:
My welder has 18 IRFP2907 MOSFETs in parallel driven by 1 obsolete DS0026 driver chip.  The capacitor bank is 20V, 3.6F, <0.6 milliohm ESR.  It can spank around 20,000 amps.
beduino:
I've made my spot welding machine based on old bulky transformer 230VAC instead of playing with tricky condensator based ones.
In the case of transformer in my case two thyristors in anti-parallel configuration did the job on transformer primary, so no need to deal with huge current like in the case of condensator based spot welders.

Quite interesting way to controll transformer based spot welders is triggering by pulse train synchronization by the mains voltage described in detail here: http://www.datelec.fr/secteur/ST%20AN308.pdf  but I didn't had time to test this so far.

Anyway, I will make a try soon, since I need more powerfull and reliable spot welder.

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