Preliminary study on pulse width adjustable pulse generator based on the magnetic switch and metal-oxide varistor

The pulsed power technology has been applied to many defense and industrial fields. Different applications have different demands on the parameters of the pulsed power systems. However, the parameters of the current pulsed power systems are usually fixed and cannot be changed easily. As a special nonlinear device, metal-oxide varistor was considered to be applied for generating square pulses. Moreover, the magnetic switches are widely used in the field of the pulsed power technology due to the special switching characteristic. This paper proposed a high voltage pulse generator with pulse width adjustable based on the magnetic switch and metal-oxide varistor. The pulse forming network and metal-oxide varistor were combined to generate quasi-square pulses, the magnetic switch was used as a crowbar switch to sharpen the falling edge and the pulse width was adjusted by changing the reset current. The paper carried on theoretical analysis as well as simulation study, and developed preliminary experiment based on the simulation results. In the preliminary experiment, the falling edge of the voltage waveforms obtained on a dummy water load is less than 50 ns, the flat-top is about 7 kV and the pulse width is adjustable within 200 ns-900 ns. This kind of pulse generator with pulse width adjustable can be applied to many fields such as corona plasma generation, industrial dedusting and medical disinfection.