Design of stacked Blumlein PFNs with photoconductive semiconductor switches

A stacked Blumlein pulse forming network(B-PFN) was designed to drive repetitive high-Z X-ray diode. Numerical simulation was adopted to optimize the system parameters, through which inductance design principle was aquired. B-PFN performance was analyzed from several aspects: consistency of charging voltage, distortion of output wave, efficiency of stacked voltage and amplitude of load pre-pulse. Experiments showed that the single B-PFN voltage efficiency was 0.71, the two-stage stacked voltage efficiency was 0.96, when PCSS electric field was 23.2 kV/cm and trigger laser energy was 3.5 mJ.