Design and development of a prototype 25 kV, 10 A long pulse Marx modulator for high power klystron

Research, design, and development of high average power modulators for the proposed Indian Spallation Neutron Source are in progress at Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology. With this objective, a prototype of 25 kV, 10 A, 1 ms Marx modulator at repetition rate of 1 Hz has been designed and developed which serves as a proof of principle and technology assessment stage for further development of high repetition rate high voltage high average power modulators. Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) based modules of 2.8 kV switching capability have been used as main modules. The modulator had 8.2% droop in output voltage pulse without any droop compensation circuit. A droop compensation involving 15 corrector modules has been used to reduce the droop up to 1%. We have used IGBT based 250 V switches to realize the corrector module. A microcontroller based control unit was designed and developed for triggering the main and corrector modules. With this control unit, programmable output pulse has been achieved. Electrical isolation between high voltage circuits and control circuit has been achieved by the use of fiber optic based control signal transmission. Output pulses of 1 ms pulse width, 800 ns rise time, and 5 μs fall time have been achieved. The modulator has advantages of modular design, adjustable pulse width, adjustable rise time, and fall time.