Experimental Study on the Self-Breakdown Characteristics of Corona Stabilized Switch

The advances in demands of plasma application have resulted in the requirement to develop high-repetition pulsed power system with high-power closing switches capable of operating at 1kHz and above. The spark gap switch has a number of desirable attributes for pulsed power applications, including simplicity, wide voltage range and low jitter. However, traditional spark gaps are normally limited by their low repetition frequencies of less than 100Hz. Studies have shown that a phenomenon named corona-stabilization may provide enough insulating recovery time for the gap to prevent pre-breakdown. Based on the corona-stabilization, a kind of spark gap switch named corona stabilized switch has been designed with the aim of operating at kHz level[1], but the advantages of traditional spark gap switch such as high self-breakdown voltage are sacrificed because of the structural features. To overcome the shortages, the self-breakdown characteristics of corona stabilized switch have been studied to find how to improve the self-breakdown voltage and the breakdown voltage stability without reducing the operating frequency.