Experimental research on the triggering characteristic of TVS under AC condition

Triggered vacuum switches (TVS), have found fast growing applications in the field of power system and pulse power. A closing switch is the necessary controlling device of power supply of an ElectroMagnetic Launcher (EML) system and synthetic making test of high-voltage circuit breakers for short-circuit current introduce, which should have the ability to quick connect the circuit and precisely controlling the moment of connection. It also should isolate the high power storage, then close the circuit at a set time. TVS gets fast development in recent years, which attributes to its many advantages. High insulation level of vacuum medium and the fast diffusion of post-arc plasma make TVS have the ability to turn on and off high voltage and high current with higher frequency. Electrodes and trigger are sealed in the vacuum chamber and free from outside disturbance, that ensures the reliability of TVS. Arcs running in vacuum have very low arc voltage that leads to much lower energy input to the arc and thus result in a lower electrode erosion rate. In our research, a series experiments have been carried out on the sample TVS especially with AC load between the main electrodes. The triggering and delay characteristics were emphatically expounded. An elaborated circuit for controlling the TVS is proposed herein. The triggering energy of the controller can be adjusted conveniently. By means of changing the triggering energy, the experimental results show that the delay and jitter times decrease with increasing trigger energy. The delay and jitter times decreases magnificently with the increasing voltage in the main gap. By increasing the main-gap voltage, the triggered probability increases.