Characterization and Circuit Modeling of Pulse Current Generators for HEMP Testing

The Pulse Current Injection (PCI) technique is foreseen by several international Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) standards to test the vulnerability of electrical/electronic units to intense transient electromagnetic disturbances. In this work, equivalent circuit modeling of a commercial PCI generator is addressed by using a non-intrusive characterization procedure at the external port, which does not require information on internal parameters. To this end, the PCI generator is firstly characterized in the frequency domain by using a vector network analyzer. Then a multi-goal optimization procedure is exploited to assign proper values to the involved circuit parameters. The initial voltage across the internal capacitor, which determines the pulse intensity, is then optimized for each pulse level starting from time-domain measurement under different conditions. Eventually, the proposed model is used to predict the time-domain behavior of a simplified PCI setup with ad-hoc injection coupler, and the simulation results show satisfactory agreement with measurements.