Development of a 400 MW pulsed-power system

Abstract

A pulsed-power system using parallel plate capacitor bank (PPCB) is being built Parallel-plate capacitor bank is a symmetrical structure which has two wings of capacitors connected in parallel Half of the PPCB has been built called the south wing The other one is called the north wing and will be built in near future Each wing consists of 5-brick of capacitors connected in parallel where a single brick is formed by two 1-uF capacitors connected in series Total capacitance of the south wing is 2 5 uF Capacitors of south wing are charged to 20 kV storing 500 J of energy The low-inductance rail-gap switch is used The fast-rising high-voltage pulse signal generated by the Marx generator is used to trigger the rail-gap switch To trigger the rail-gap switch forming the multichannel discharge the fast trigger pulse with a rising speed > 5 kV/ns is needed We use a 3-stage Marx generator in a multistep-triggering system to provide a high voltage trigger pulse with a falling speed of 7 7 ±1 4 kV/ns We have tested the performance of the south wing The curve-fitting results showed that the total inductance of the south wing was 265 ±2 nH (with a 53-nH load) the inductance of the rail-gap switch was 60 ±20 nH and the inductance of the one-brick capacitor was 120 ±30 nH The south wing provided a peak current of 59 2 ±0 7 kA with a rising time of 1280 ±10 ns and power was 363 ±7 MW The jitter of the peak current respect to the trigger pulse was only 11 ns 1% of the rise time Therefore we can synchronize the north wing and the south wing within the accuracy of 1% once the north wing is also constructed Therefore we are expecting a peak current of ~120 kA when the full PPCB is built in the near future

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English
Supervisor	Po-Yu Chang (Supervisor)