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

When driving capacitive loads, pulses with steep falling edges are difficult to obtain using conventional pulsed power modulators, which also makes them unsuitable for operating at higher frequencies. In this paper, a repetitive high voltage pulse adder is described, which can generate nearly rectangular pulses even with capacitive loads. This pulse adder is based on solid-state switches, and each power stage contains two Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (MOSFETs): one set which outputs high voltage pulses and the other set which is used to dissipate charges stored in the load and distributed capacitors. Testing the proposed pulse adder with dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) loads, nearly rectangular pulses are obtained. In our present work, a 40-stage modulator has been built and successfully operates at an output voltage of 30 kV and a repetitive frequency of 20 kHz. The rise and fall times are less than 200 ns, and a minimum pulse width of 6 μs was obtained. This prototype has been applied in DBD experiment research.