Experimental Study on the Multichannel Discharge Characteristics of a Multi-Plasma-Jet Triggered Gas Switch

We described the fabrication and testing of a multi-plasma-jet triggered gas switch(MPJTGS). The MPTJGS consists of two high-voltage electrodes and a trigger electrode, in which a novel six-channel annular microplasma gun is embedded to generate multichannel plasma jets as seed electron sources when a nanosecond trigger pulse arrives. The multiple discharge channels were induced by the multichannel plasma jets. We investigated the multichannel discharge performance of the MPJTGS in two working modes with charging voltage of ±25 kV, trigger voltage of +40 kV (25-ns rise time), and trigger energy of 2, 32, and 240 J at different working coefficients. Results showed that the average number of discharge channels increased as the trigger energy increased, and decreased as the working coefficient decreased. The MPJTGS operated in Mode II had better multichannel discharge characteristics than in Mode I at the same condition. At trigger energy of 240 J and working coefficient of 87.1%, the average number of discharge channels could reach 7 in Mode II.