Author: DelPriore, G.
Paper Title Page
THP052 Affordable Short Pulse Marx Modulator 849
 
  • R.A. Phillips, G. DelPriore, M.P.J. Gaudreau, M.K. Kempkes
    Diversified Technologies, Inc., Bedford, Massachusetts, USA
  • J.A. Casey
    Rockfield Research Inc., Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
 
  Funding: DOE Contract DE-SC0004251
High volt­age short-pulse kly­stron mod­u­la­tors are re­quired for nu­mer­ous X-Band ac­cel­er­a­tor de­signs. At the very high volt­ages re­quired for these trans­mit­ters, all of the ex­ist­ing de­signs are based on pulse trans­form­ers, which sig­nif­i­cantly lim­its their per­for­mance and ef­fi­ciency. There is not a fully op­ti­mized, trans­former-less mod­u­la­tor de­sign ca­pa­ble of meet­ing the de­mand­ing re­quire­ments of very peak power, short pulse RF sta­tions. Under a U.S. De­part­ment of En­ergy grant, Di­ver­si­fied Tech­nolo­gies, Inc. (DTI) is de­vel­op­ing a short pulse, solid-state Marx mod­u­la­tor. The mod­u­la­tor is de­signed for high ef­fi­ciency in the 100 kV to 500 kV range, for cur­rents up to 250 A, pulse lengths of 0.2 to 5.0 μs, and rise­times <300 ns. Key ob­jec­tives of the de­vel­op­ment ef­fort are mod­u­lar­ity and scal­a­bil­ity, com­bined with low cost and ease of man­u­fac­ture. For short-pulse mod­u­la­tors, this Marx topol­ogy pro­vides a means to achieve fast rise­times and flat­top con­trol that are not avail­able with hard switch or trans­former-cou­pled topolo­gies. The sys­tem is in the final stages of test­ing prior to in­stal­la­tion at Yale Uni­ver­sity.