Compact pulse generators with soft ferromagnetic cores driven by gunpowder and explosive

Area of Science:

• Physics
• Materials Science
• Electrical Engineering

Background:

• Compact pulse generators are crucial for various applications requiring rapid energy discharge.
• Existing designs often face limitations in flux management and pulse characteristics.
• Soft and hard ferromagnets offer unique magnetic properties for energy storage and field generation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate compact pulse generator designs utilizing soft and hard ferromagnets.
• To evaluate two distinct methods for reducing magnetic flux within these generators.
• To compare the resulting voltage pulse characteristics from each flux reduction technique.

Main Methods:

• Designed and constructed compact pulse generators incorporating soft ferromagnets (inner core) and hard ferromagnets (outer field).
• Implemented two magnetic flux reduction strategies: gunpowder-induced core ejection and explosive-induced core demagnetization.
• Tested generator performance using coils of different turns (80-turn and 37-turn) and measured output voltage and pulse width.

Main Results:

• Gunpowder method (80-turn coil) produced pulses with 78.6 V amplitude and 0.41 ms pulse width.
• Explosive method (37-turn coil) generated higher amplitude pulses of 1.41 kV with a 11.68 μs pulse width.
• Both flux reduction methods proved successful but resulted in significantly different voltage waveform characteristics.

Conclusions:

• Compact pulse generators utilizing ferromagnets can be effectively designed with distinct flux reduction techniques.
• The choice between gunpowder ejection and explosive demagnetization offers a trade-off between pulse amplitude and duration.
• These findings provide valuable insights for tailoring pulse generator performance to specific application requirements.