摘要 |
A spacecraft (10) includes N paralleled power converters (24a, 24b . . . ) for producing current pulses in response to converter synchronizing pulses. The current pulses are integrated (28) to produce an operating direct voltage. The synchronizing pulses are produced in a recurrent cycle by a synchronizer (30). The synchronizer includes a voltage divider (320) with equal series-connected elements (324a, 324b . . . ), each of which is paralleled by a shorting switch (330a, 330b . . . ). A sawtooth signal generator (310) produces a sawtooth signal (312), which is applied in common to each of a plurality of comparators (332a, 332b . . . ). The voltage divider (320) is connected across a reference voltage (318), to produce a plurality of reference voltages at the taps (328a, 328b). Each comparator (332) compares the sawtooth ramp (314) with one of the reference voltages, so that the comparators trigger in sequence as the ramp rises. The comparators trigger at times corresponding to equal phase increments of 360 DEG /N at the ramp recurrence frequency, where N is the number of power converters being driven. If a power converter fails, it produces a NOGO signal, which causes the associated voltage divider switch to close, to thereby short-circuit one of the divider elements. This redistributes the phase increments, so the remaining power converters continue to be synchronized in equal phase increments.
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