Experimental study of vacuum switch applied in pulse source system

The high power pulse source driving electromagnetic rail gun requires some characteristics of the core device switch, such as strong charge transfer ability and standing high peak pulse current. Meanwhile, when the total driving current is got by adding several pulse currents generated by different modules respectively, the source requires short jitter of switch. The test platform is built for studying static and dynamic characteristics of triggered vacuum switch (TVS). Under conditions that peak value of triggering pulse is 15 kV and gap distance is 1 mm, our experiment results show that: the average self-breakdown voltage is 15.2 kV, minimum operating voltage is 130 V, and the operating voltage range is from 0.7% to 90%. Meanwhile, the biggest discharging delay time is 400 ns and the jitter is 15.2 ns. We also have studied the switch in the high-power pulse source based on network topology, and our experiment results show that: the vacuum switch is able to stand 196 kA peak pulse current and transfer charge up to 194.8 C each time. It is suggested by our experiment results that: the switch has wide operating voltage scope and strong charge transfer ability, and could stand high peak current, furthermore the switches satisfy the requirement of the synchronization of multi-module.