Development of Compact Pulsed Power Generator for Keeping Freshness of Agricultural and Marine ProductsProducts

Intense pulse-electric field (PEF) and plasma have been tried to apply in agriculture and food processing such as seed germination promotion, seedling growth enhancement and inactivation of bacteri. The key issue of the study is production of multi-reaction field of plasma and PEF with spatially and temporally control to adapt whole bio-scale. It is important to develop and to design the compact pulsed power generator for controlling to match the impedance between the power generator and the biological load which are work as capacitive and resistive [1]. We developed the compact pulsed power generator based on the inductive energy system (IES) using SiC-MOSFET switching devise. The pulsed power generator consists of DC power supply, IES circuit including the semiconductor opening switch and the pulse transformer as shown in Fig. 1. The developed pulsed power generator is in scale of $95 \mathrm{~mm} \times 70 \mathrm{~mm}$ as shown in Fig. 2 [2]. The input DC voltage of the primary is around several-tens volts. The 10 kV of pulse voltage is produced at primary side of the pulsed transformer with several-tens nanoseconds of the pulse width. The 10 kV pulse voltage is amplified to 30 kV by the pulse transform ⃞ with 1: 3 winding ratio. The multi-streamer discharges were generated using the pulsed power generator to decompose the ethylene $\left(\mathrm{C}_{2} \mathrm{H}_{4}\right)$ gas for keeping the freshness of the agricultural products [3]. The C2 H4 gas was successfully removed using the multi-streamer discharge plasma reactor driven by the developed pulsed power generator. The pulsed electric field was applied to the marine product for reducing activity of the enzyme which accelerate the ATP decay. The ATP decay of the marine products was improved by applying the pulse electric field.