Optimal Design of a DC Reset Circuit for Pulse Transformers

Pulsed power systems often use a pulse transformer to generate high voltage pulses. In order to improve the utilization of the transformer core material usually a dc reset circuit is applied which results in a smaller transformer volume. However, by the use of a reset circuit additional losses are genrated. Usually, in the dimensioning of the reset circuit only the copper losses are considered but these are only a small part of the whole losses. In this paper analytical equations for calculating the losses in the pulsed power system and a method for optimizing a dc reset circuit are presented. With the optimization method a reset circuit for an existing system is designed and the results are validated by simulation and by measurements.