Insulator damage from a moving arc in a surface discharge switch

A Surface Discharge Switch (SDS) has been constructed to evaluate insulator materials exposed to discharge currents in excess of 500 kA for both static and moving arc discharges. The purpose of this work is to test various dielectric materials as candidates for the insulator material in high current pulsed power devices. Both static and moving arc electrode geometries are shown in Fig. 1. The SDS is shown schematically in Fig. 2 with maximum operating parameters listed in Table 1.