Voltage amplification effect of nonlinear transmission lines for fast high voltage pulse generation

The authors have proposed a new scheme of high voltage pulse generation utilizing a nonlinear transmission line (NLTL). The scheme is based on the voltage amplification effect of the process of the formation and collision of solitons in the NLTL with ferroelectric ceramic capacitors. Using the head-on collision scheme of two solitons, a fast high voltage pulse with 11 kV amplitude and 76 ns pulse width has been successfully obtained from a 3.6 kV, 300 ns initial pulse generated by a 3000 V class SI thyristor with a repetition rate of 1 kHz. In addition, they have employed stacked nonlinear transmission lines to obtain a much higher voltage amplification ratio. The scheme, known as stacked cable transformers, consists basically of equal lengths of transmission line connected in parallel at the input side, and in series at the output.