Design and Study of 40KJ Capacitor Bank for Dense Plasma Applications

Use of pulsed power engineering is vast with the applications in the class of Giga and Tera watt devices includes Z pinch which requires high current and high voltages which can be obtained with the many parallel and synchronously operated pulsed power drivers [1]. The device used most often for switching high energies in short times from a capacitor bank is the spark gap switch. The most common design for a spark gap has been the three electrodes, employing an anode, cathode, and triggering electrode. The different triggering schemes for spark gap switches are field distortion type and trigatron type. The field distortion type switch is designed with plane profile [2] electrode for obtaining the uniform field in the discharge gap. The trigger electrode is pin type electrode having disc structure placed exactly in middle of two main high voltage electrodes. The requirement of a capacitor discharge bank for a fast low-impedance switch can be met by using many spark gaps in parallel which reduces the inductance of switch and the circuit, driving high currents into load [3]. The four similar spark gaps connected to four capacitors are in parallel discharging into common load is designed and its experimental results are reported.