Efficient design of a two-stage MPC system for dielectric test stand

Magnetic pulse compression (MPC) system has been used widely over the past decades as a technique for producing short duration, high peak power pulses reliably. Recently this technique has been used at higher and higher repetition rates. As repetition rate increases, losses become increasingly important. Magnetization losses in the MPC cores lead to core heating which degrades switching performance. An efficiency design strategy for a two-stage MPC system is introduced. In the strategy presented here, the total losses are minimized with respect to the individual core gains, and the resulting compression design has a lower overall loss and a better distribution of losses through the system. The gain of the final stage and hence its core volume are reduced. This allows low inductance geometries to be attained more easily, or lower loss/higher volume materials to be used. There is however an increase in the total volume of core material required in the traditional approach whose total core volume is minimized with equal gain obtained in each of the stages. However the traditional approach leads to an imbalance in the distribution of losses between stages, and at high pulse repetition rates the losses in the final stage become excessive. By optimizing the distribution of the compression ratio at each stage, the maximum energy transfer efficiency of the two stage MPC system was 87.6%. This approach can be applied to more than two-stage MPC. With this MPC and IGBT we obtained the MPC output power of 3 kW at a repetition rate of 10 kHz.