Design and implementation of a xenon flash lamp power supply system for electronic printing application

This study attempted to implement the pulse power supply and ignition circuits of a xenon flash lamp in intense pulsed light (IPL) systems used in electronic printing. Owing to the unique load characteristics of the xenon flash lamp, a special power supply design is essential to drive it. Specifically, the pulse power supply integrates the LCC resonant converter-based charging unit, designed to achieve high efficiency and high-power density charging, and a discharging unit, comprising the discharging IGBT and RDC snubber circuits, to realize stable pulse transfer to the load. For the ignition process, the high-voltage output trigger was designed based on the Cockcroft–Walton voltage multiplier. Meanwhile, the simmer was adopted as the step-down LCC resonant converter with the characteristics of both voltage and current sources to maintain the xenon flash lamp ignition. An auxiliary ignition circuit based on a boost-type resonant circuit was also added to stabilize the simmer output during ignition. In this study, we analyzed the sequence of operating the xenon lamp for ignition and light sintering by designing and developing appropriate parameters for each specification. Finally, the implemented power supply was verified through simulated load, and the xenon flash lamp was confirmed to be turned on normally through experiments. Additionally, the reliability was verified by applying the proposed device to the IPL system.