Impact of spark gap breakdown phenomena on the output voltage of compact marx generators

Compact Marx Generators (CMG) are widely used as portable pulse generators in different applications. They are of great importance anywhere that pulses with rise times on the order of tens of nanoseconds are needed such as nanosecond-pulse breakdown. Considering the fact that the breakdown of a spark gap is a statistical process, the delay times of the closing switches are also statistical and voltage dependent parameters. In this paper, a generalized state space-based model for compact Marx generators is proposed. It can be useful in investigating the impacts of statistical behavior of the breakdown process in spark gaps and closing switch time delays on nanosecond-pulse breakdown rod-plate gaps in nitrogen. Moreover, to increase the transferred current and energy to load, CMGs are used in parallel. The simulation results indicate that in this case, it is more important to have output voltages pulses with temporal low jitter. Discharges were modeled by a nonlinear load using a Rompe-Weizel model to calculate the time-dependent resistances of the spark gaps. The stray capacitances were calculated using electrostatic simulations.