Design of a 12 MJ capacitor bank of the pulsed high magnetic field facility at HUST, Wuhan, China

A new facility for experiments in pulsed high magnetic fields up to 80 T is under construction at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) in Wuhan, China, funded by the National Development and Reformation Committee (NDRC). The pulsed power supplies are a modular 12 MJ/25 kV capacitor bank and a 100 MW/100 MJ flywheel pulse generator, and most of field coils are energized by the capacitor bank with thyristor switches. The capacitor bank consists of 11 independent 1 MJ modules with a shortcut current of each 40 kA and 2 independent 0.5 MJ modules with each 50 kA. In this paper the design of the capacitor bank, including capacitor, protection coil, discharge switch, crowbar circuit and polarity changing circuit, is explained in detail. Digital simulation results of the capacitor bank driving pulse magnets with dual polarity fields are presented.