A compact solid-state high voltage pulse generator

In this paper, a compact solid-state high voltage pulse generator, composed of a pulse transformer and a magnetic pulse compressor, is investigated numerically and experimentally. The generator can achieve pulses with a peak voltage over several tens of kilovolts and a rise-time in the microsecond level, which can be widely used in plasma physics research, high power microwave generation, and material treatment. Specifically, PSpice software is used to analyze the performance of the generator. Then, the generator was constructed in our laboratory. The experimental results illustrate that when the charging voltage of the generator was changing from 10 kV to 14 kV, typical pulses with a peak voltage ranging from 67 kV to 95 kV and rise-time between 10 µs and 12 µs were obtained on a dummy load. The generator can continually work over 10 min with a repetitive rate of 20 Hz, and until now, it has been successfully achieving over 1 × 10⁶ high voltage pulses. Experiments show reasonable agreement with numerical analysis.