Effective Conductivity Model for the Time-Domain Simulation of Active Microwave Pulse Compressors

Active microwave pulse compressors (MPCs) have been under study during the last decades. Various methods are presented in the literature for the steady-state design of MPCs. On the contrary, studies on the optimization of active MPCs in time are very limited because it is rather cumbersome to simulate the time-dependent operation of the gas discharge tube (GDT). In this work, we propose a methodology to derive a time-dependent conductivity model for GDT by comparing simulation data with compressed pulses from experiments. The derived GDT model is used to demonstrate the effect of the MPC geometry on the compressed pulse shape and to show that the optimal steady-state design does not produce the highest amplitude pulse.