Design of Driving Power Supplies for Improvement of Thyratron Jitter Characteristic

This article describes designs for power supplies for driving a high-power thyratron switch. To improve the delay time jitter of the thyratron, three driving power supplies (trigger, cathode heater, and reservoir heater) are designed. Based on inductive energy storage (IES) with an opening switch, the trigger power supply (TPS) is designed to generate controllable output pulse voltage (1–10 kV) as well as pulse energy (1–5 mJ) for investigating thyratron switching features. Depending on the specifications of the cathode heater (8 V, 100 A) and reservoir heater (8 V, 25 A) power supply,
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resonant converters are designed to use their soft-switching properties. Since the output ripples affect the thyratron switching characteristics, the high-frequency operation of the converter allows for reducing ripples with a minimized output filter. Designs of three power supplies were verified from individual rated operations as well as experiments with L4888 thyratron. Switching features of the L4888 thyratron were analyzed based on operating conditions of power supplies and 152 ps of rms delay time jitter was achieved.