Investigation of insulating characteristics of pressurized gas spark gap switch

• Published in: 2013 Annual Report Conference on Electrical Insulation and Dielectric Phenomena pp. 875 - 878
• Main Authors: Zicheng Zhang, Hanwu Yang, Jian Xu, Jiande Zhang, Baoliang Qian
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.10.2013
• Subjects: Breakdown voltage; Sparks; Switches; Switching circuits; Transmission line measurements; Voltage measurement
• ISSN: 0084-9162; 2576-2397
• DOI: 10.1109/CEIDP.2013.6748224

The effects of gas pressure on the operation performance of the spark gap switch in the rep-rate mode are experimentally investigated. The experimental results are presented and analyzed. The conclusions are shown as follows. (1) pressurization can significantly improve the characteristics in repetitive mode, and the improved level of the characteristics is almost the same for different pressurization level; (2) for gas pressure in the range of 2.0 MPa, both the breakdown voltage and its pulse-to-pulse instability (RMS) decrease with the pulse number, and reach the steady operation when the pulses exceed 50; (3) the instability increases with the pulse rep-rate. Particularly, the instability is less than 5% in the range of less than 50 Hz. Once the pulse repetition rate exceeds 100 Hz, the instability will exceed 10%; (4) the average value of the breakdown voltage of spark gap switch declines with the increase of the number of pulses in a batch, and the pulse-to-pulse instability of the breakdown voltage increases with the increased repetition rate, which are both because of the declined recovery degree of the gas spark switch on the electric insulation level; (5) the pulse-to-pulse instability of the breakdown voltage decreases with the increase of the number of pulses in a batch, which is because the breakdown voltage tends to or reaches to be stable, being resulted from the modification of former several tens pulses.