Fuse conditioning of the output of a capacitor bank to drive a PEOS

Abstract

The paper details power capacitor bank experiments performed to assess the performance of a pulsed power plasma erosion opening switch (PEOS). A description is given of the PEOS, which was of an inexpensive and expendable design, and was intended for use as the final stage of a flux compressor output conditioning circuit. Techniques using automatically operating exploding foils, as both opening and closing switches, condition the 9 /spl mu/s quarter-wave output pulse from the capacitor bank to a 400 ns pulse to the PEOS. An outline is given of the computer modelling and the experimental procedures used to establish the optimum operating conditions, and results are presented which illustrate the behaviour of the PEOS.