Conveners
7.2 High Current and High Power Pulsers I
- Mark Savage (Sandia National Laboratories)
We recently continued the pioneering work done by Chris Rose and Kalpac Dighe at Los Alamos National Laboratory. (“Multiple-Pulse High-Voltage Diode Isolation Testing for a Linear Accelerator (LIA)” B. Trent McCuistian, Dale Dalmas, Kalpak Dighe, Chris Rose, Manolito Sanchez, Robert Sedillo, J. Martin Taccetti, in Proceeding of the 2017 Pulsed Power Conference at Brighton, England, June 2017)....
Most of the previous studies of petawatt-class Z-pinch accelerator are performing the circuit simulation based on a full circuit model. This model may cause non-ignorable error because it is under the assumption of TEM modes transmission along the MRTLs. In this paper, a method for field-circuit coupling simulation of petawatt-class Z-pinch accelerator was developed, which considered the...
A low-impedance MILO is being developed at Texas Tech University, and a compact Marx generator was designed to drive it. The target design goals of the Marx are an output voltage greater than 500 kV and an output current greater than 40 kA. Risetime needs to be sub 150 ns and the pulsewidth must be greater than 100 ns. These performance goals were determined from PIC simulation of the MILO...
Invasive species, plants and animals introduced to ecosystems without natural predators or controls, are a global problem. The Asian Carp has invaded the Mississippi River Basin in the USA, and now threatens the Great Lakes. To prevent migration of this large invasive species into the Great Lakes, the US Army Corp of Engineers has built and operated two demonstration barriers in the Chicago...
The basic operation of a Marx generator is well known and simple: capacitors are charged in parallel through high impedances and discharged in series, thus multiplying the output voltage compared to the charging voltage. As a basic explanation, in a Marx generator using spark gap switches, triggering the first stage is sufficient to double the voltage on the second stage’s switch and so on....
As a new method to enhance nanosecond pulsed power, aiming improvement of cold plasma applications, we designed a type of circuit that is amplified by synchronization of double simple inductive energy storage (IES) circuits with a semiconductor opening switch (SOS) diode. Secondary circuits of simple IES circuits which consist of capacitors, a pulse transformer, MOS-gated thyristors, and a...
The PHELIX portable pulsed power driver has recently completed a set of experiments examining the response of granular material to convergent shock loading. Here a nearly 4 MA peak current is delivered to a Z-pinch load with a quarter wave cycle time of ~3 us. This produces B ~ 0.30 MG field at the surface of a ~3 cm diameter, 1 mm thick, 3 cm tall Al liner. The liner is accelerated to ~800...