An improved rolled strip pulse forming line

The rolled strip pulse forming line (RSPFL) has advantages of compactness, portability, and long pulse achievability which could well meet the requirements of industrial application of the pulse power technology. In this paper, an improved RSPFL with an additional insulator between the grounded conductors is investigated numerically and experimentally. Results demonstrate that the jitter on the flat-top of the output voltage waveform is reduced to 3.8% due to the improved structure. Theoretical analysis shows that the electromagnetic coupling between the conductors of the RSPFL strongly influences the output voltage waveform. Therefore, the new structure was designed to minimize the detrimental effect of the electromagnetic coupling. Simulation results show that the electromagnetic coupling can be efficiently reduced in the improved RSPFL. Experimental results illustrate that the improved RSPFL, with dimensions and weight of Φ 290 × 250 mm and 16 kg, when used as a simple pulse forming line, could generate a well shaped quasi-square pulse with output power of hundreds of MW and pulse duration of 250 ns. Importantly, the improved RSPFL was successfully used as a Blumlein pulse forming line, and a 10.8 kV, 260 ns quasi-square pulse was obtained on a 2 Ω dummy load. Experiments show reasonable agreement with numerical analysis.