High-Voltage High-Frequency Damped Sinewave Pulser for EMP Simulation

A damped sinusoidal waveform can be generated by a simple series RLC ringing circuit. However, for high frequency (≳50 MHz) oscillation, it is extremely difficult to achieve a smooth output waveform for a given Q and R. This is mainly because very little energy can be initially stored in the capacitor C to maintain the ringing through the switch gap. To solve this problem, many identical parallel RLC branches were used. The basic idea was to store more energy in the system, and make every branch oscillate at the same frequency, so that the operation of the gap could be improved and the original requirements could still be satisfied. In practice, all the auxiliary branches were combined into a few paths to reduce the engineering complexity.