Repetitive high voltage rectangular waveform pulse adder for pulsed discharge of capacitive load

When connected to capacitive loads, pulses with steep falling edge are hardly obtained by using conventional pulsed power modulators, which also leads them not suitable for operation at high repetitive frequency. In this paper, a repetitive high voltage pulse adder is described, which can generate rectangular pulses even with capacitive loads. This pulse adder is based on solid-state switches, and each power stage contains two MOSFETs: one of them outputs high voltage pulses and the other is used to dissipate charges stored in load and distributed capacitor. Testing the proposed pulse adder with dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) load, nearly rectangular pulses are obtained. In our present work, a 40-stage modulator has been built and successfully operates at output voltage of 30 kV, repetitive frequency of 20 kHz, both rise time and fall time less than 250ns, and minimum pulse width of 6 us. This prototype has been applied to DBD experiment research.