Why Snubbers?

Why Snubbers? Part of a series of videos augmenting Snubber Circuits for Power for Power Electronics by Rudy Severns.

This video discusses why you need snubbers and why the book on snubber circuit design was written. It is a companion to the preface of the book. But it contains a bonus, how Rudy Severns got interested in them and had to learn about them.

Previous videos provide, in a natural progression, the insights necessary to master snubber design.

You may not have the bandwidth to see the video, so a much shorter audio file and a transcript are provided.

Video - Why Snubbers?

(2:48)

Audio - Why Snubbers?

Listen to the audio of Snubber Measurement (432 kB)

Transcript - Why Snubbers?

Why am I interested in snubber circuits and when did I first become interested in snubber circuits?

It goes back, really, a long time. Over 50 years ago when I was a boy I first encountered DC/DC power converters. In fact, the DC/DC converters that I was involved with were the vibrator power supplies that were in automobile radios at the time. I was modifying them for amateur use.

Very quickly I learned the lessons of what happens to the contacts of a mechanical switch if it is not properly snubbed. This was one of the original uses for snubber circuits, the actual capacitive snubber circuits.

Of course, over the years, (as I have worked now for 45, almost 50 years, in power electronics) I discovered that you really need to understand how to protect the switches, whether it is a mechanical switch, a vacuum tube switch, gas switch, or semi-conductor switches. The fact that you're doing switching in an inductive environment means you need to know how to protect that switch.

The key element in switch protection is the snubber circuit and how to design it.

One of the things I have noticed is that even though there have been literally hundreds of papers written on snubber circuits, nobody has really pulled it all together in one collected version.

Of course, you can't put it all together in a collected version, but you can certainly get out the basic ideas, the categories, and so forth. That's really the purpose behind this book; to give you a really good overview of snubber circuits and how to design the snubber circuits.

As I said, my interest is a very practical one. As a practicing design engineer for nearly 50 years I have had to use snubbers. I have to work with them and in the process I have had to learn about them. Sometimes, if I haven't learned quickly enough, I have failures with lots of smoke in the lab.

So snubber circuits are important and I am hoping that this book that I put together for you will actually make it easier and quicker to come up on the curve.

Rudy Severns' book "Snubber Circuits for Power Electronics" is available for purchase on the Internet as an ebook in PDF format at WWW.SNUBBERDESIGN.COM

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Original: March 11, 2008

Revised: March 21, 2008

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