Design of a Low-voltage 340 GHz TWT Amplifier with Stagger Double Vane Slow Wave Structure

In this paper, a low-voltage (~15kV) staggered double vane slow wave structure (SDV-SWS) travelling wave tube (TWT) amplifier with a cylindrical beam tunnel operating at 340GHz is designed and optimized with good beam-wave matching bandwidth and transmission characteristic. The effects of physical simulation parameters on beam-wave interaction of this SDV-SWS CW-TWT are studied thoroughly. With the beam voltage of 15.3 kV and beam current of 0.04 A, this two-stage TWT has a maximum output power of 18.9 W, a beam-wave interaction efficiency of 3% and a peak gain of 29.7 dB near the center frequency with a 3 dB bandwidth of 40GHz.