Electronic – Capacitor Discharge Time Problem

capacitordischargepartial discharge

I have a capacitor rated 15000 µF, 35V.

So, I charge my capacitor to 15V with no problems using a charging resistor.
Now while discharging, I am using thyristor (2N6509G) as my switching device and a coil as my discharge resistor. Coil resistance is about 2 Ω.

Using the discharge equation of capacitor, I calculated the discharge time in this setup, which comes out to be around 81 ms for (assumed) final voltage of 1 V.

In my application, I wish to discharge the capacitor only for 20 ms.
But when I do that, the capacitor voltage drops down to 0.9V in just this 20 ms duration instead of the calculated 7.7V (using discharge time calculators online).

If I am not doing anything wrong in the setup, what is it that I am not understanding conceptually? How do I go about discharging capacitors only to some fraction of the stored charge?

Edit: Thank you all for your comments, I am sorry for not being very clear with the details.

So, this is a coil gun model basically.
Coil :- Copper magnet wire: AWG 20; no of turns: 650; Coil resistance: 2ohms

I actually used an online calculator for capacitor. Discharge Time Calculator

I used another calculator to get the inductance of this coil which came out to be 8.88mH. Coil Calculator

Discharging side of the capacitor

*Note: This circuit is not my original work.

Best Answer

I'm reasonably sure your real problem is that your expecting your thyristor to turn "OFF" when you remove your 20ms pulsed trigger signal. It doesn't, it will latch on until the energy stored in the capacitor is largely dissipated because the anode current from the capacitor holds it "ON".

With a coil you do have an LC circuit, or when accounting for the resistances in the circuit (such as the 2 Ohm coil resistance) an RLC circuit. That being said, with 15 mF, 2 Ohms, and a small enough inductance value (you don't give one) the resulting very high damping ratio will make treating it like a simple RC circuit an acceptable approximation. See below where the capacitor discharges to 7.7V at 20ms as previously noted. I’ve arbitrarily assumed a 100uH coil, it would have to be quite a bit larger to start to have an impact, and that would actually slow down the capacitors discharge, not speed it up. My assumption is the actual coil inductance is quite small, that assumption could certainly be incorrect. If large it would do a damped sinusoidal oscillation over a longer period of time as Olin mentioned.

enter image description here

I doubt you are getting a more rapid discharge at all, you are just actually discharging the capacitor for a lot longer than the 20ms trigger pulse because the thyristor latches “ON” until the capacitor is sufficiently discharged (it doesn’t turn off just because the trigger pulse ceased). Connected an oscilloscope to measure the voltage across the capacitor over time to check this and you would presumably see around 7.7V at around 20ms, but then the voltage continuing to drop from there until the current drops enough to finally turn “OFF” the thyristor.

If you want a 20ms pulse I wouldn’t use a thyristor, I would probably just use a simpler high current NPN transistor. That would “pulse” with the trigger, carry the large current, and not latch like a thyristor.

Another note of caution, if you abruptly cut off the current through the coil, any magnetic field built up in the coil will collapse and potentially cause a large voltage spike across the coil at that time, so usually some sort of a voltage clamp is recommended if this is happening.