A High-Power Sheet Beam Slow-Wave Structure of Traveling Wave Tubes

Abstract

In future electronic devices, the trade-off between power capacity and thermal management will be a severe challenge. In this letter, a sheet beam slow-wave structure (SB-SWS) has been proposed to realize high-power output while taking into account cooling design inside the traveling-wave tubes (TWT). The design of the modified structure ensures a sufficient axial electric field component to realize efficient interaction, meanwhile expands the width of the metal vanes by 327% to design micro-channel cooling. The power load capacity for electronic interception increased by 25%. Utilizing all-period optimization technology, the maximum output power can reach 4 kW, corresponding 18.8% electronic extraction efficiency. Also presented further is a proof-of-concept design model of Ka-band for practical test. The consistency between experiment and theory shows that this SWS is not only suitable for microwave frequency band, but more suitable for future miniaturized devices in sub-millimeter wave and terahertz bands.