A re-evaluation of current measurements downstream of the plasma opening switch on DECADE Module 1

Abstract

The plasma opening switch (POS) has been used for pulse compression and power amplification in a variety of inductive energy storage systems with conduction times ranging from tens of nanoseconds to in excess of one microsecond. In such systems, the POS first acts as a low series resistance while charging a vacuum inductor with energy from a capacitive store, and then rapidly transitions to a high resistance to transfer the energy quickly and at high power to a parallel load. Because of the implications to size and cost of a pulsed power generator, improvement of the POS in terms of scaling the switch to higher voltage and current operation has been a major emphasis of research over the past several years. To improve and better understand the operation of plasma opening switches, it is highly desirable to have data from a variety of diagnostics that provide a clear and internally consistent description of switch operation.