Compact Battery-Powered 400-kV High-Voltage Pulse Generator for UWB EMP Generation

This article presents the implementation of a high-voltage pulse generator for portable ultrawideband (UWB) electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generation. The generator is designed to meet the portability requirements and generate high-voltage pulses with a short rise time and high repetition rate. To achieve a high step-up ratio efficiently, an inductive isolation-based Marx generator is employed, driven by a high-voltage capacitor charger (HVCC). The HVCC is designed with a Cockcroft-Walton voltage multiplier (CWVM)-based bipolar hybrid symmetrical voltage multiplier (BHSVM) to increase the low battery voltage (24 V) to over 60 kV, ensuring effective high-voltage boosting and insulation. Additionally, an equivalent modeling technique is proposed for the BHSVM circuit, and based on this, an LCC resonant converter was implemented without additional magnetic components. The parameters of the LCC resonant converter were designed to enable soft switching across the entire output voltage range, considering the repeated charging and discharging involved in the application. Moreover, the design incorporates a high-voltage transformer with insulation of >10 kV and a charging cable instead of the conventional charging resistor, ensuring both insulation and charging resistance. Simulations validated the accuracy of the BHSVM equivalent model and the high-efficiency operation of the LCC resonant converter across the full voltage range. Experimental results demonstrated that the compact, high-density high-voltage pulse generator can deliver high-voltage pulse at the repetition rate of 120 Hz to the antenna and UWB EMP with an amplitude of 421 kV and a rise time of 0.5 ns.