High Voltage Generator
This high voltage generator was designed with the aim of testing the electrical break-down protection used on the railways. These protection measures are used to ensure that any external metal parts will never be at a high voltage. If that were about to happen, a very large current would flow (in the order of kilo-amps), which causes the protection to operate, creating a short circuit to ground effectively earthing the metal parts. This hap-pens when, for example, a lightning strike hits the overhead line (or their supports) on the railways. This generator generates a high voltage of 1,000 V, but with an output current that is limited to few milliamps. This permits the electrical breakdown protection to be tested with-out it going into a short circuit state. The circuit uses common parts throughout: a TL494 pulse-width modulator, several FETs or bipolar switching transistors, a simple 1.4 VA mains transformer and a discrete voltage multiplier. P1 is used to set the maximum...