Electronic – Should I gate SCRs on when reverse-biased

gate-drivingscr

I've been told that it's a bad idea to gate SCRs on when reverse-biased. Is that accurate? I'm reasonably confident that the SCRs won't actually conduct reverse-biased whether gated or not; are there circumstances where that is not true? Are there other problems with gating a reverse-biased SCR? Increased losses? Decreased lifetime?

Best Answer

In a former life where I worked in power electronics we would not gate the SCRs on in reverse conduction because it reduced the reverse blocking capability of the SCR. It would therefore be easier for an inductive spike or other transient to force the SCR on and ultimately lead to its destruction.

I don't have any evidence to back this up, it was "tribal knowledge" from our greybeard engineers. We were also working on medium voltage (up to 4kV) and high voltage (13kV and up) systems where we had a number of SCRs in series and it was very important to maintain reverse blocking voltage.