Experiments of a monolithic radial transmission line

This paper presents the experimental results of a monolithic radial transmission line (MRTL) that may be used in pulsed power generators and microwave devices. The MRTL with a hyperbolic impedance profile is 508 mm in radius, corresponding to a one-way transit time of 15 ns for the electromagnetic wave. In the experiments, up to twenty identical voltage pulses, 10 ns in FWHM and 2 ns in rise-time, were fed into the MRTL through 20 input BNC connectors that are uniformly distributed along the outer circumference of the MRTL. It was found that the amplitude of the voltage from the output BNC connector located in the center of the MRTL is nearly proportional to the total number of the input branches. The effect of the failure modes on the output voltage was investigated. For the MRTL driven by 20 input branches, while the open-circuit or short-circuit even in one input branch considerably decreases the amplitude of the output voltage, the jitter shorter than 2 ns in 3 input branches makes no obvious effect on the output voltage.