Plasma reactors with nanosecond coronas and semiconductor SOS generators

Summary form only given, as follows. Silicon semiconductor opening switches have been developed at the Institute of Electrophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. These switches are widely used in pulsed power technology with inductive energy storage. A series of pulse generators have been developed which operate at voltages of 10/sup 2/-10/sup 3/ kV and generate an average power of 10/sup 2/-5.10/sup 4/ W in a pulse of duration 1-50 ns with a pulse repetition rate of 1-10 Hz. These systems are capable of operating into various loads such as generators of electron and ion beams and X-rays, lasers, microwave oscillators, etc. These loads have one disadvantage in common: they are low-resistive. This is a handicap to an efficient energy transfer from the inductive energy store to the load. A nanosecond corona discharge can serve as a highly efficient load for this type of generator. Two plasma reactors operating with corona discharges have been studied experimentally. Used in these experiments were a 100-kV, 1-kW generator producing pulses of controllable duration 5-40 ns and a 0.8-MV, 30-kW, 50-ns generator. The plasma volume of the first and the second reactors was 25 l and over 1000 l, respectively. With a pulsed voltage of 0.8 MV the corona diameter was over 1 m. Based on this concept, it is possible to create plasma reactors with a volume of over 10 m/sup 3/. The possibility of using this type of plasma reactor for removing organic and inorganic impurities from air has been investigated.