Square-Wave-Fed Cockcroft-Walton Voltage Multipliers for Ionic Propulsion in Atmosphere

The development of high-power-density and efficient high-voltage DC/DC power electronic circuits plays a crucial role in ionic propulsion's potential employment. Traditional voltage multipliers (VMs) are typically fed by sinusoidal voltages delivered by a resonant converter coupled with a high-voltage step-up transformer. This paper explores a transformerless solution, achieved by feeding the VM directly with the inverter's square wave output voltage. Although requiring additional multiplier stages to get the same output voltage level, this configuration simplifies the implementation and could be suitable for size- and weight-sensitive applications. The performance and feasibility of the square-wave-fed VMs are evaluated, and it is demonstrated that lower output voltage ripple and drop and better system dynamic response are achieved with this approach.