I have seen thyristor triggering circuits that have the load placed in either the "anode" or "cathode" side of the thyristor. Are there any advantages/disadvantages as to load placement?

 

Apart from the fact that your doc shows a triac not a thyristor there is no difference from the point of view of power control.

However there is a difference from the point of view of safety. The first diagram shows one side of the load connected to earth or neutral, the second shows it connected to line or floating. Consider exposed terminals under fault conditions.

 

I've extracted the image from your document file and attached it.

I'm done for the day - I'll leave it up to someone else to answer your question.

 

I think that the term thyristor is used to refer to a class of devices of which the triac, scr, and diac are a few of the more familiar members.

hgmjr

 

http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_3/chpt_7/index.html

 

for the SCR nor the load it does not make any difference actually, if you connect it to the anode or cathode side. Only difference is how to connect the control block of the SCR. For example to control 4 SCR-s in the bridge, you'll have three different pulse circuitries with isolated commons.

 

You may find these application notes helpful:

http://www.onsemi.com/pub_link/Collateral/HBD855-D.PDF
http://www.littelfuse.com/data/en/Application_Notes/AN1003.pdf

In some applications, such as capacitance discharge welders, having the SCR on the low side empirically gives better results. If you look at the two AN's you will also notice the examples put the "switch" on the low side quite often. John