Periodic oscillatory damping pulse current conditioning of gas discharge tube

Conditioning is one of the important producing techniques for enhancing GDT (gas discharge tube) performance and stability. Based on the study of traditional AC and DC conditioning, the paper proposed the periodic oscillatory damping pulse current conditioning. Experimental results obtained that periodic oscillatory damping pulse current conditioning is superior to AC conditioning or DC conditioning. Through Comparison of conditioning effect of different structural GDT (including gas pressure and spacing etc), it is found that the conditioning energy is the uppermost factor, and with discharge voltage of GDT increasing, the required conditioning energy showed a downward trend. By controlling conditioning energy, the jitter of breakdown voltage of GDT filled with nitrogen gas is less than 10% and less than 5% for GDT filled argon gas.