Design of a novel gate driver circuit for a Marx generator based 40kV electric fence energizer

Marx generator is a High Voltage Pulsed Power Supply (HVPPS) technique that consists of switches and capacitors. This paper considers design of a Marx generator consisting of 100 stages for a 40kV non-lethal electric fence. The gate drivers for the employed semiconductor switches have to meet the requirements of synchronized switching and high voltage isolation up to 40kV. Gate driver schemes generally used for Marx generators employ optocouplers and pulse transformers. To meet the requirements, these schemes result in costly, bulky and complex circuits when implemented for a large number of stages of a Marx generator making it an unattractive choice for low power applications (such as an electric fence) despite its many superior features over other HVPPS schemes. Electric fence application has an additional requirement of controlled release of energy to the output to ensure non-lethal behavior. Therefore, a novel gate driver design is presented here which is compact, economical and also ensures control over output energy, hence making Marx generator an attractive design option for electric fence applications. The proposed novel gate drivers were simulated and implemented in hardware for 100 stages to generate 40kV pulses of 15μs at repetition rate of 100Hz with each pulse delivering up to 18mJ energy. The reliability of the systems was tested for a successful continuous run of 10 hours.