Characterization of dielectric properties of commercial ceramic capacitors for pulsed power applications

It is found currently a wide diversity of dielectrics used for the construction of capacitors, where barium and strontium titanate-based ceramics are the most used. This study concerns the dielectric characterization of commercial ceramics capacitors for use in high voltage capacitors of high-energy storage systems and soliton wave generation for RF production in space applications. To characterize the dielectric material two commercial ceramic capacitors were submitted to HV tests to determine the dielectric constant variation with the applied voltage and the dielectric strength voltage (breakdown -BD) under pulsed conditions. The results show that ceramic capacitors present BD strength of the order of 90-200 kV/cm and non linear behavior, i.e. the ceramic dielectric constant is greatly reduced with the voltage increase.