Industrial technology prospects on a base of the plasma opening switch

Summary form only given, as follows. The report discusses technical opportunities and basic conditions to implement plasma opening switch technology for industrial purposes. Having a certain experience in near 100 kW range in 1991-95 (RS-20 and subsequent machines) we plan to extend this technology for new uses but we can not do it simply on a base of RS-20. When we analyze requirements of the certain technology we can use POS-based accelerator only when high peak dose rate together with short pulse width are required. This is important firstly for radiation-biology technologies (sterilizing) and for those used to destroyed hazardous organic materials and substances. Experiments on sterilizing have shown an increase of sterilizing effect at RS-20 comparing with /sup 60/Co source sterilizing. Dose decreasing due to high peak dose rate allowed not only accelerator power decrease but could be important for medical sterilizing due to low radiation dose strength of materials used in medicine. Limits on POS operation such as vacuum recovery process limiting repetition rate and maximum voltage could be obtained in the POS gap are also discussed. Analyzing an efficiency of the accelerator based on POS technology new schemes are proposed combining POS and diode in one unit to avoid current losses and to improve efficiency of the machine.