Design of a damped sinusoidal oscillator system

A damped sinusoidal (DS) oscillator system has been designed and fabricated in our laboratory. The system consists of a primary power source, a Marx generator, a transmission line oscillator, and a helical antenna. A Marx generator is used to feed 300kV high voltage pulse to the DS oscillator. The designed characteristic impedance and average switching voltage of the DS oscillator is 6.3 ohm and 300kV respectively. The axial mode helical antenna is designed to operate at a frequency around 250MHz. The whole DS oscillator system has been simulated using FEMM, Pspice and CST MWS. The measured maximum horizontal electric field is 18kV/m at a range of 10m when the transmission line oscillator is charged with 230kV. This paper describes works performed in initial design stage, computer simulation stage, and test results of our manufactured DS system.