Modeling of Wound Coaxial Blumlein Pulsers

Blumlein pulsers are well-suited devices for high-voltage pulse generation in nanosecond and microsecond ranges. These generators have been used with great success in several areas such as in breakdown tests, X-ray generation, lasers, and high-energy plasma implantation. They consist of lengths of transmission lines charged in parallel and synchronously discharged in series into the load by using single or multiple switches at the opposite line endings. The main problem with the device performance is the presence of the shield cable impedance contributing to the Blumlein power loss especially when using only one switch. The very well known technique used for minimizing these losses consists of winding the transmission lines to increase the line shielding inductance if coaxial cables are used. Therefore, herein, circuit models are presented to assess theoretically the temporal response of the wound coaxial Blumlein pulsers by using a SPICE circuit simulator. For model assessment, the authors used the experimental results produced by a wound coaxial Blumlein pulser of 100 kV/200 A with 1.0 mus of pulse duration constructed for applications in surface treatment of polymers and aluminum with high-energy ions