Switching characteristics of aluminum foils used in small inductively energy storage system

Vaporization of fine wires in water has a good performance as the opening switch, and is able to be utilized easily. On the other hand, it is expected that the exploding foils have also a good performance but there is a few report as opening switches. So we constructed a small pulsed power generator, and investigated switching characteristics of aluminum foils. The condenser of 50 kV, 3.2 µF was used at the charged voltage of 20 kV. With copper wires, the peak voltage and the pulse width were 85 kV and 800 ns, respectively. When 8 µm thick aluminum foils were used, the peak voltages were not changed, but its pulse width became long. Moreover the power consumed in the switch increased 50 %. This fact suggests that the larger power is able to be transferred to a load.