Current Transmission Efficiency for Conical Magnetically Insulated Transmission Line on a 1.0-MV Linear Transformer Driver System

Current transmission efficiency in a conical transition magnetically insulated transmission line (MITL) has been studied experimentally on a 1.0-MV linear transformer driver system, which has 10 identical cavities connected in series with MITL. Transmission efficiencies of anode current as high as 98.4% and 93.1% could be achieved when the MITL operates at load-limited and self-limited flows, respectively. As for the cathode current, because of the sufficient length of conical transition MITL, cathode current is also able to sustain high transmission efficiency. But as long as the diode gap is too large, many of the electrons will be launched into the anode-cathode gap and the cathode current near the diode drastically decreases. Particle-in-cell simulations were conducted to validate the conclusions. The simulation results agree with experiments.