Measurement of electromagnetic radiation dissipation in pulse power supply discharging

A 2MJ pulse power supply (PPS) has been designed to support the development and evaluation of candidate propellants for an Electrothermal-Chemical (ETC) gun. The overall power system consists of twenty capacitive 100kJ pulse power modules. Each capacitor bank of the 100kJ module consists of two 12kV 50kJ capacitors. A triggered vacuum switch (TVS) was adopted as the main pulse power-closing switch. Electromagnetic radiation dissipation is always observed in pulse power supply discharging experiments. This kind of pulse radiate dissipation always has an influence in discharging peak current and load energy deposition. A copper wire sensor is designed and employed to measure the radiation intensity distributions near the facility. And the whole system's radiate dissipation is also obtained in calculations. Results show that radiation dissipation is always detected at the TVS triggering moment in synchronized discharging model. The received signal has a main frequency nearly 125kHz, and rapidly oscillating damped in 1ms. The radiation dissipation energy is nearly 3% in the whole discharging energy and the discharge efficiency keeps more than 75%.