Reproducibility Improvement on High Voltage Self-Break Water Switches

CESAR, a high current electron beam facility (800 kV, 400 kA) and AMBIORIX, a 2 MA Z-pinch driver are two of the main pulsed power facilities at CEA-CESTA in France. They use the classical technology of low-impedance generators, a Marx generator associated with a water line. One of the limitations of this kind of device is the switching process between the water lines. In order to improve the reproducibility, their first water switches were recently changed. On the basis of the work done by Puetz et al. for RITS-3 [1], the geometry of the main switch of each device, which links the intermediate storage (IS) and the pulse forming line (PFL), has been optimized. In this paper, we present the results of this modification.