Capacitor units with air insulation for linear transformers

The design of two capacitor units intended for use in high-power pulsed generators is described and the results of their tests are presented. Each unit is an assembly consisting of a multichannel spark gap and two capacitors with a total capacitance of 80 or 16 nF and a charging voltage of up to 100 kV. The use of air at atmospheric pressure as the insulating and working medium of the spark gap is a feature of the capacitor units. The following parameters of the output pulses were obtained at a resistive load for the 80- and 16-nF units: currents of ∼48 and ∼20 kA, voltages of ∼55 and ∼52 kV, and times of energy deposition into the load of ∼140 and ∼60 ns, respectively. A model for numerical calculation of the transient discharge process in the capacitor units is presented and the influence of the capacitance of the capacitors and the number of spark channels in the spark gap on the parameters of the generated pulse is analyzed.