Critical factors for thyratrons with extended lifetimes

There are many and varied end-of-life symptoms for thyratrons; tripping (power supply over-current), pre-firing (self-triggering), mis-firing (failing to trigger), high grid spike voltages, high leakage current, changes in recovery time, increased jitter, etc. However, there are very few things that can actually go wrong with a thyratron, and the majority of end-of-life symptoms can be attributed directly to one or more of the following phenomena; gas clean-up, anode erosion, cathode depletion. The authors describe briefly each of these, and demonstrate that a combination of improved thyratron technology and modern circuit techniques substantially extends thyratron lifetimes for the more demanding applications