The Linear Transformer Driver Magnetically Insulated Inductive Voltage Adder Design And Simulation

Linear Transformer Driver (LTD), as a novel pulsed power technology, has made a great progress since 1970s especially after Year 2000 around when its fast driving capability was proved. LTD is a compact and modular technology with advantages of flexibility and high energy transfer efficiency, and has attracted much interest of researchers. The principle of power multiplication of LTD is converging current by parallel discharging and increasing voltage by magnetically insulated inductive adder, rather than compressing pulse in time domain.In this thesis, the study backgrounds and driver outlines of pulsed power technology was introduced as well as the milestones for LTD. The principle of Magnetically-insulated Inductive Voltage Adder (MIVA) was expressed in more detail. Then, some typical MIVA facilities were illustrated.The core part of this thesis is principle analysis for MIVA, physical design and simulation for a 10-stage LTD facility which is based on MIVA and 100 kA LTD modules. The 100kA modules, which are based on previous 4-switch module, each can drive 1Ωcritical load, with the rise time less than 60 ns. The peak power for the facility is greater than 100GW. Circuit simulations were conducted to study how the IVA impedance affects output waveform. Particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations were performed to study how the IVA structure, polarity as well as explosive emission threshold affect output waveform. It indicates that when driving a 10ft load, the 10-stage LTD facility can generate 100GW pulse with rise time less than 60ns. Since LTD module is compact in dimension, when the module number is small, the transit time in multi-stage LTD facility is far less than the rise of the pulse. In such situation, the IVA's impedance profile affects the output pulse weakly when there isn't electron emission. When there is electron emission, if magnetic insulation can be satisfied, output pulses don't change much for different IVA structures, neither. When IVA polarity reversed from negative to positive, the amplitude of the main pulse changes slightly, but the vacuum pre-cursor increases in amplitude, and lasts longer, and the leading edge becomes less smooth. The same conclusion can be made when the explosive emission threshold increases.In all, the thesis supplies a set of procedure for multi-stage LTD design, simulation and assessment, which could be used as reference in future study.