Prospects of building capacitive nonlinear lines using ceramic PZT for high-frequency operation

The objective of this paper is the study of ceramic dielectrics for nonlinear transmission line (NLTL) applications in high-voltage (HV) compact pulsed power systems at high frequencies. Barium and strontium titanate (BST) ceramics have been used with great success as excellent dielectrics in the construction of high voltage (HV) commercial ceramic capacitors with reduced dimensions because of their high dielectric constant. However, the attempts to reach frequencies above 500 MHz up to 1 GHz using BST ceramics in nonlinear lumped lines have been unsuccessful due to the loss in the dielectric material that limits the operating frequencies up to about 250 MHz. On the other hand, these results indicated that the use of a lower loss nonlinear dielectric of reduced permittivity could be the solution for achieving higher frequencies in nonlinear capacitive lines. Therefore, the main point of this work is to characterize another type of ceramic known as PZT (Lead Zirconate Titanate), which is promising for NLTL applications.