Kanji Abe ¹, Ryo Ogata ¹, Kei Eguchi ¹, Krit Smerpitak ², Sawai Pongswatd ²

Affiliations
1 Department of Information Electronics, Fukuoka Institute of Technology, JP
2 Faculty of Engineering, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, TH

Abstract

In this paper, a novel non-thermal food processing system utilizing an underwater shockwave is proposed to process food at high speed. In the non-thermal food processing, target foods are crushed by an underwater shockwave generated by a high voltage. Unlike conventional non-thermal food processing systems, the proposed system has a high voltage multiplier which can generate the underwater shockwave at high speed. Therefore, the proposed system can achieve a high production capacity. The validity of the proposed high voltage multiplier is confirmed by the Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE) simulation. Furthermore, the feasibility of the proposed system is verified by demonstrating the proposed system by the experiments. In the experiments, an apple is softened by discharging 3.5kV stepped-up voltage.

Keywords

High Speed Operations, High Voltage Multipliers, Non-Thermal Food Processing, Step-Up Voltage Multipliers, Underwater Shockwaves.

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Kei Eguchi ¹, Wanglok Do ¹, Kanji Abe ¹, Krit Smerpitak ², Sawai Pongswatd ²

Affiliations
1 Department of Information Electronics, Fukuoka Institute of Technology, JP
2 Faculty of Engineering, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology, Ladkrabang, TH

Abstract

Switched capacitor (SC) techniques is used in order to design a simple inductor-less ac-ac converter with small size and high input power factor. Comparing conventional inductor-less ac-ac converters with the proposed converter, an input/ output (I/O) terminal is connected alternately to one of capacitors to achieve ac-ac conversion. To realize the new topology, the new designed converter is composed of two capacitors and four switches in the conversion ratios of 2 and 1/2. For this reason, as well as high input power factor, the proposed converter can achieve small size. To explain how the proposed converter is operated with the conversion ratios of 2 and 1/2, operation’s law, analysis in theory, and results of circuit simulation are written on this paper. The validity of the proposed converter is confirmed by circuit simulations using SPICE simulator.

Keywords

Direct AC-AC Converters, Power Converters, Switched Capacitor Techniques, Switching Mode Power Supply

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