Performance improvement of a magnetically insulated transmission line oscillator with a carbon fiber array cathode.

Abstract

A carbon fiber array cathode (CFAC) was presented and tested in a magnetically insulated transmission line oscillator (MILO) in earlier papers; however, the performance of this cathode was not as good as the traditional polymer velvet cathode, and the nonuniform fibers' distribution on the cathode surface was postulated as the culprit for this. In this paper, this CFAC has been carefully reprocessed, and the performance is improved (efficiency increases from ∼12% to ∼16%) and reaches a level that is as good as the velvet cathode, which means that this CFAC provides a promising substitute for the polymer velvet cathode in MILO.