AC-Powered Pulse Generator

Electric pulse field methods are wildly used in biotechnology and industrial applications. A pulse generator (PG) is the device that provides the desired electric pulse field. In this paper, a novel ac-powered PG (ACPG) that is directly powered by normal ac power (i.e., utility power) is proposed. Since there is no high-voltage dc power supply in the proposed ACPG, the circuit complexity and cost are effectively reduced. Furthermore, the voltage and duration of the generated pulse of the ACPG can easily be controlled to match specific applications. In order to assess the performance of the proposed ACPG, a prototype for providing a unipolar and a bipolar pulse train is designed and implemented. Experimental results show that the ACPG can actually generate a 0-1040-V pulse with a 750-ns to 118-mus duration without overshooting and ringing