Aurora Synchronization Improvement

The Aurora flash x-ray simulator has undergone a series of hardware upgrades over the past five years. The upgrades have improved simulator reliability and have provided new environments for hardness testing. Recently, synchronization of the four pulse-forming lines (PFLs) has been significantly improved over the original design. The four parallel PFLs are now synchronized to within 10 ns over 60% of the shots. This paper describes the current switching scheine, reports the current timing statistics, and discusses the effects of improved synchronization on hardness test parameters such as shot to shot, reproducibility of the dose.