Development of a heavy duty pulsed power generator with ten spark gap switches

Long lifetime heavy duty pulsed power sources become more and more attractive for industrial applications such as gas/water cleaning, etc. One critical issue associated with such kind of source is the heavy switching duty. This paper describes a multiple switches based large scale prototype setup. It consists of ten high-pressure spark gap switches and a ten-stage transmission-line-transformer (TLT). By means of the TLT, the ten spark gap switches are able to share the heavy switching duty identically and simultaneously. At the switching side, the ten spark gap switches are interconnected via the TLT, and are put into one cavity. At the output side the TLT is put in parallel, thus it has very low output impedance, i.e. 5 ohm. This prototype has been successfully demonstrated. In this paper, the development and experimental results will be presented.